VERSE VICE: POEMS BOND DIVERSE GROUP AT CAPE GIRARDEAU PUBLIC LIBRARY

"Because poetry is not marketable, poetry is incorruptible." -- Robert Wrigley.

"We eat our stories and starve." -- Kim Barnes

"I like poems that take you to the outskirts of town and then kick you out of the car." -- Billy Collins

Poetry Night at the Cape Girardeau Public Library begins with a reading of Adrienne Rich's dark poem "Shattered Head." After the poem concludes, someone remarks on the beauty of the images "bloodshot eye, bloodshot mind."

Pass the cookies and flavored coffees.

As Poetry Night illustrates, poetry is balm to one, incendiary device to another.

Notre Dame High School librarian Joyce Seyer prefers poems that rhyme, and this night she reads a poem she gave her son hoping he would finish high school. He did.

Niki Hennrich counters with a poem called "The True Story of Snow White," a cynical look at fairy tales.

Someone else reads from "Spud Songs," an anthology of potato poems, "just to show that anything can get published."

Seven people, a relatively small turnout considering the Poetry Night 60-person mailing list, have come to read and hear poetry this night. One of them is Marilyn Hutchings, a library employee who teaches freshman composition at Southeast and is Poetry Night's guiding light.

If it is possible to know someone somewhat by the poetry they read, this is a group that includes people who like happy poems, people who read poetry for the catharsis, and people who write poetry because it is necessary to their souls.

The listening styles differ. Some watch the reader. Some stare at their own fingers.

Hennrich reads two poems of her own, one a defiant promise to live before she dies, and another a search for the solitude necessary "to form floating words into images."

Hennrich is a photojournalist for KFVS-TV.

Others also write poetry themselves.

"Sometimes you've got to write it so you can quit thinking about it," says John Boyd, a mental health counselor from Cape Girardeau.

Madonna West, a Cape Girardean who works for Southwestern Bell, wrote her first poem 28 years ago and wrote 50 as a teen-ager. She quit writing for many years and just started again a few weeks ago.

She recites one of her poems from memory. Afterward she admits to feeling vulnerable. "You're exposing your thoughts," she said.

Teri Wondra of Cape Girardeau works with people who have developmental disabilities. She reads a poem that encompasses AIDs and Lee Harvey Oswald. Another poem she reads is titled "How to Watch Your Brother Die."

One woman at Poetry Night called in sick to work so she could come. She prefers to remain anonymous. She reads Carl Sandburg's "At a Window," in which he writes of "fiends and cats that kill quick as a thought."

Larry McMackins works for Drury Hotels and is writing a novel about a man coming home from the war.

"I only recently discovered I can write bad poetry," he says.

Poetry is a bond between them.

"Being together and listening to each other read makes reading poetry 1,000 times better," says Boyd, who is known to go around reading poems to people at work.

"Poetry is meant to be shared," Hutchings adds.

They love KRCU's "Poetry in the Air," poetry readings sandwiched between the music programming. "It just stops you," Wondra says.

The bond is in the words.

To Seyer, poetry is "the language of the heart. It's your feelings."

West compares poetry to visual art. "You paint pictures with words."

"It breaks down social barriers," says the woman who called in sick but seems to be feeling better every minute.

Poetry Night is held on the fourth Monday of every month at the library. A Touch of Grace provides the coffees. The next one begins at 7 p.m. Monday.