March 3, 1994

Contact: Craig D'Ooge (202) 707-9189

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Noontime Poetry Reading To Celebrate Spring

The end of a cold, snowy winter will be celebrated with daffodils, "lovely trees" and other images of spring in poems to be read at noon on the vernal equinox, Monday, March 21, in the Library of Congress Mary Pickford Theater, third floor, Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. The reading is the second in the "Poetry at Noon" Series sponsored by the Office of Scholarly Programs. No tickets are required.

Three Washington-area poets, Miles David Moore, Judith McCombs, and James Hopkins, will help mark the spring equinox, the time when night and day are of roughly equal length all over the world. The term "equinox" derives from the Latin, aequus nox, or "equal night."

Drawing on classic and contemporary works, including a sampling of their own poems, the three poets will each read for about 15 minutes.

Moore, a journalist and poet, is also a gifted reader andmember of the 1993 Washington Poetry Slam Team. Recently he appeared on the WPFW-FM program "The Poet and the Poem."

McCombs, also a practiced reader, has several books of poetry published, including 20/20 Visionary Eclipse--Experimental Word Art and Against Nature: Wilderness Poems. The author of two critical books on novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, McCombs has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Maryland State Council on the arts.

Hopkins, the youngest of the three, is a poet of the Virginia landscape and rural South. As an undergraduate, he was poetry editor of the Duke University literary magazine.

The final "Poetry at Noon" event this season will be held June 1 and will feature readings appropriate for weddings.

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PR 94-049
3/3/94
ISSN 0731-3527