'Cruellest Month' Kicks Off at Library

"April is the cruellest month," poet T.S. Eliot once wrote. That makes it the perfect month to celebrate poetry.

It's National Poetry Month, and Towson Library is celebrating with the Cruellest Month Poetry Festival, now in its sixth year. The festivities include readings and other activities with the Towson ARTS Collective.

Chris Casamassima and Doug Mowbray, co-founders and co-curators of the festival, started the event at Towson University in 2005 to open up the discussion of writing and poetry and to get the community involved.

 “We’re trying to promote creative literacy in the community,” Casamassima said.

Not long after the series was created, Casamassima and Mowbray helped found the Towson ARTS Collective, and each runs his own publishing press there, Furniture Press Books and twentythreebooks, respectively.

The Cruellest Month Poetry Festival has been held at Towson University, the Towson Arts Collective, the French Press (now Bread and Circuses) and it is now in its second year at the Towson Library.

For the festival this year, the Towson Arts Collective and the Towson Library are sponsoring four nights of free readings and performances every Monday in April. Each night is hosted by a local arts organization.

Hosts for this year’s series will be Barbara DeCesare, BrickHouse Books, Smile, Hon, You’re in Baltimore! and the Maryland Writers Association.

A new promotional feature of the festival this year is the Poem Walk, a walking tour of poetry through downtown Towson. More than seventy poems are featured in the walk at over twenty different local businesses.

“It’s a good way for poetry to become something alive, like walking through a book,” Casamassima  said.

Clarinda Harriss, owner and operator of BrickHouse Books and a retired Towson University professor, taught Casamassima and Mowbray in her poetry classes when they were students at the university, and is excited to be involved in the Cruellest Month Poetry Festival.

“Poetry is more important than ever because we’re in an era of soundbites, and poetry sort of comes in small packages, or can,” Harriss said. “I find people more interested in it than ever, and it’s partly because there’s a greater need to reflect on the world around us than there ever has been.”

Casamassima agrees that poetry is more important than ever, and his goal is to get the community more involved through the Cruellest Month Poetry Festivals and Poem Walk.

“People growing up in school have been brainwashed to believe that there is a definite way of interpreting poems, that they have to study long and hard in order to understand,  and Doug and I are trying to destroy that myth,” Casamassima said. “It’s not about scholarship ... It’s about collaboration, it’s about civic responsibility, it’s about creative literacy.”

For more information about the Cruellest Month Poetry Festival and the Poem Walk, visit http://crumopoperfest.blogspot.com/.