Cedar Crest’s poetry group enjoys expressing their emotions via verse

By Joel Keller
ERICKSON TRIBUNE

What draws me and invites me to write so regularly?

Often I am moved as each one reads

The lines she off ers us for our scrutiny.

As Deborah Greenberg describes in the fi rst lines of her poem, “The Monday Poets Society,” the members of the poetry group at Cedar Crest are more than just a group of people reading words off a page.

“We share more than poems,” says group leader Loyola Vuolo. “I wouldn’t call it a therapy group, but we do share our problems. If someone is writing a sad poem, they reveal the reason why they wrote it.”

During the group’s meetings, each member brings a poem or two to read. After reading, other members of the group critique the writing. Even seemingly small items— the use of “a” instead of “the,” the placement of a comma— are scrutinized and voiced by the members. It’s a tough room, but all members seem to appreciate the feedback.

“That’s one of the things I appreciate,” says Greenberg. “It always comes from a generous attitude, and it’s not personal.”

“We’re more instinctive than vindictive,” chimes in member Jan Rumeau, the group’s stickler on punctuation and spelling.

What do the members write about? “Anything,” says Vuolo, who still has some of the first poems she wrote when she was a child. “(It could be) silly, sad, patriotic, about the war. The mountain is a great source of inspiration.” She’s speaking about the mountain on which the Cedar Crest campus sits. In fact, the mountain looms large for the group: two volumes of the group’s poetry were selfpublished under the title Poetic Views from the Mountain.

Group members, like everyone who lives at Cedar Crest, come from a number of different backgrounds. Some of them have been writing poetry their whole lives, while others have just started putting their thoughts into verse, encouraged by Vuolo and others to join the group.