Our celebration of 2019’s One Book/One Philadelphia continues with a communal read aloud of Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till. This award-winning poetry collection, for middle grade and up, explores the life and death of Emmett Till, and how that death continues to echo in contemporary events.

The 2019 One Book/One Philadelphia middle-grade book is Jewell Parker Rhode’s Ghost Boys, in which Emmett Till’s ghost works with the ghost of 12 year year old Black boy killed by police to explore the effects of historical racism. Our communal read aloud and discussion of Nelson’s book will extend these themes into our own lives and communities.

The Communal Read-Aloud will be followed by workshop on using writing forms to contain trauma. Click here for more information.

Join us for an informal evening of sharing together the Mary Oliver poems we've loved best. Bring your favorites to read aloud, or just come to listen. Drop in anytime during the evening!

So sorry, this event is cancelled due to illness.

cancelled due to staff illness. Please join us for "Leaves of Grass" next Sunday at Awbury Arboretum.

Join us for a community-read of Whitman's Drum-Taps, a powerful collection of poems written as witness to the devastation of the Civil War.The poems of "Drum Taps" are immediate, sharp, even impressionistic - and carry the palpable grief of having seen 80,000 wounded, and in those bodies the understanding of what war does to the human body and soul.

On Drum-Taps
Markedly different from Whitman’s usual romantic, celebratory, and expansive poems about the individual and the collective in America, Drum-Taps contained poems that bore witness to the violence of war with a sense of intimacy and fear. In Whitman’s account of what he called the “red business” of the war, there’s his usual sense of compassion, but there’s rage and hopelessness too, as can be read in the first section of “The Wound-Dresser,” in which the speaker says, “Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, / But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself / To sit by the wounded and sooth them, or silently watch the dead.” The dead are numerous in these poems, and dutifully accounted for, as in his poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” in which the speaker spends time lovingly addressing each of the three dead soldiers in the poem: “And who are you my child and darling? / Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?”

Six months after his original publication of Drum-Taps, Whitman republished the book with a “sequel,” a series of poems responding to the end of the war, including the death of Lincoln. This edition included Whitman’s famous elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” which shares the elegiac, anaphoric “O” exclamations also present in his other famous poem about Lincoln: “O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; / Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills.”

Ultimately Whitman included an edited version of Drum-Taps in his next edition of Leaves of Grass, published that same year—though only thirty-eight of the original seventy-one poems in the collection appeared in later editions of Leaves of Grass.

In the end, Whitman, who was so resolute in his aim to publish Drum-Taps—going so far as to publish the first edition on his own dime—was at least pleased that he was able to accomplish his goal: to put to words all that he had seen during the war. In another letter he sent to O’Connor, on January 6, 1865, Whitman said, “Drum-Taps delivers my ambition of the task that has haunted me, namely, to express in a poem...the pending action of this Time & Land we swim in, with all their large conflicting fluctuations of despair & hope, the shiftings, masses, & the whirl & deafening din...& then an undertone of sweetest comradeship and human love, threading its steady thread inside the chaos.”

May 31st is the 199th anniversary of Whitman's birth, and we're marking that date with two community reads: "Drum-Taps" on Memorial Day, and the 1855 Edition of "Leaves of Grass" on Sunday June 3rd at Awbury Aboretum.

Join us for a very special One Book, One Philadelphia event Big Blue Marble style - a community read aloud of Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn.

Some of our favorite local writers will be reading aloud the entire book, which should run about 3 hours. One Book, One Philadelphia staff will be on hand to introduce their program, and we'll have plenty of warm drinks and snacks on hand.

Another Brooklyn is a short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper. “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet,” the narrator begins, which perfectly conveys the novel’s suspended sorrow. Now an anthropologist who studies the way different cultures honor their dead, August is an adult looking back at her adolescence in the 1970s. She came to Brooklyn with her younger brother two decades earlier when their father hoped they could all start a new life away from the tragedies that shattered their family back in Tennessee.