Audience determines the direction of the poetry that is read live, co-creating a reading that’s never the same twice on April 19 in Newtown
The Times
Improvised poetry comes to Bucks County Community College on Friday, April 19, when the Wordsmiths Reading Series presents No River Twice at 7:30 p.m. on the Newtown Campus. No River Twice is a multi-vocal, improvisational and interactive poetry reading in which the audience determines the direction of the performance from beginning to end, poem by poem, co-creating a reading that is never the same twice.
“It’s an experiment in how to bring playfulness, surprise and communal participation into the realm of poetry readings,” said Hayden Saunier, a founder and director of No River Twice and the 1991 Bucks County Poet Laureate. “At a No River Twice performance, we track the lines that have connected words or ideas from one poem to the next.”
At the conclusion of a round of reading, the poets assemble the lines into a cento, or a poem composed of lines written by others. The term comes from the Latin word for patchwork garment.
Saunier will be joined by the 2018 Bucks County Poet Laureate Carly Volpe as a special guest. Other No River Twice poets expected to lend their voices and lines include Liz Chang, Grant Clauser, Lynn Levin, Lorraine Henrie Lins, Bernadette McBride, Ethel Rackin, and several more. Learn more at norivertwice.org.
No River Twice is free and open to the public. Bucks County Community College is located at 275 Swamp Road, Newtown, where there is ample free parking. The Wordsmiths Reading Series is part of the Bucks Live! series. To learn more, contact Dr. Ethel Rackin at 215–497–8719 or ethel.rackin@bucks.edu.
