Creativity was in the air at our last meeting. We had a special meeting with a Poetry theme was organized by Jeremy as Toastmaster of the Evening and Dyane as Table Topics Master. Starting with our introduction round, some members introduced themselves with rhyme:
“My name is Gray
And to my great dismay
I looked in the mirror today
And discovered 50 shades of …”
“My name is Wendy,
I’m not very trendy.”
“Khushi is a gal from America, who
Fell in love with a German fella […]
Because she likes speaking
She soon went out seeking and
Found a home @ Mercury Toastmasters.”
In the prepared speech session, all the speakers wonderfully read poems and brought us closer to the limitless world of imagination. Johanna told us about the great American 20th-century poet Dorothy Parker. Afterwards she recited the poem Men. Sunder read If by Rudyard Kipling, Frederike read The Bait by John Donne and Renko read two of his own poems.
Khushi delivered Project 2: Interpretive Poetry from the advanced manual, Interpretive Reading. She read three poems of the contemporary writer Billy Collins: Introduction to Poetry, Forgetfulness, To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl. Personally I also loved the introduction of her speech: Jeremy told us that Khushi admires Billy Collins because “he is contemporary without being idiomatic, he is lyric without being rhymie, he is down to earth without being trivial.”
The Table Topics session was different this time. Under the motto “Stay hungry, Stay foolish”, Dyane encouraged us to show our poetry potential. She took care to create an amazing atmosphere: she lit candles and gave Raluca, a guest, and Robert, our Sergeant at Arms, the task of creating short stories based on a picture. At the end of the Table Topics session, they read their compositions.
She also prepared a wonderful handout about poetry elements: about the difference between metaphor and simile and about types of rhyme. Among the examples, here is my favorite metaphor: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., 28 August 1963)
At the end I read some lyrics from Petro Filozofal by António Gedeão:
“They do not know that the dream is wine, it’s fizz, it’s yeast.
It’s an eager and vivacious small animal with a pointy nose that pries through everything in a perpetual motion.
They do not know that the dream is canvas and color and brush.
They do not know nor even dream that dream commands life.
When a man or a woman dreams, the world leaps and moves forward like a colorful ball in the hands of a child.”
Lesson learned: Stay hungry, Stay foolish
