GUILFORD — Two longtime residents, Tom Ragle and Don McLean, will collaborate on a public reading of Sonnets on Wednesday, May 13. The 7 p.m. program will take place at Guilford Community Church, and is admission-free with donations welcome.
Sharing a belief that poetry, which originated as an oral tradition, should be liberated from the page and read aloud, McLean and Ragle decided to help revive the practice of public recitation of the works of both classic and less-known poets.
Both readers have a lifetime of experience reading poetry to anyone who will listen.
Ragle served as president of Marlboro College from 1958 to 1981. He holds an A.B. in ancient Greek history and literature from Harvard University and a B.A. and M.A. in English language and literature from Oxford University.
He served for many years on the board of Write Action, a nonprofit organization formed to nurture, encourage and promote the literary arts in the larger Brattleboro community, and has been featured on Brattleboro's community radio station, WVEW-LP, reading poetry during the Write Action Radio Hour on Sundays, having given more than 20 hour-long readings of classical English poets from the 16th into the 20th century.
His collection of poems, Take this Song, Poems in Pursuit of Meaning, was published in 2013 under his pen name, Lee Bramble.
McLean holds an A.B. with Distinction in English Language and Literature from Boston University. He has taught courses in New England Literature at Community College of Vermont, and is known for his public readings of the works of Guilford Federalist-era poet, Royall Tyler.
For four decades he has annually read works of Hardy, Dickens, Truman Capote, Dylan Thomas and other authors on Friends of Music's Christ Church Christmas program.
Last year, he organized Guilford's celebration of the centenary of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas's birth, with readings and a performance of Under Milkwood. In 2013, he published the book Sparks, the collected writings of his mother, Jean Stewart McLean, on the 50th anniversary of her death.
All the poems on this program are sonnets, giving unity to the reading, but also, because it is a short form, allowing the sampling of many eras and poets. The golden age of the sonnet, the Elizabethan period, is particularly represented, with poets such as Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton. Donne and Milton are included, as are the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth and Keats. A favorite poet of both readers, Gerard Manley Hopkins, gets special attention. After two dozen English sonnets, the readers move for the final dozen to American poets Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. Several Vermont poets, as well as poets known to the readers, round out the evening.