The 7 Gables with your Sweetie!

For some poetry today while you read our blog, please feel click HERE  

MassPoetry will be partnering with The 7 Gables for an amazing event, February 21st at 7pm, a Melopoeia performance! 

Melopoeia is a session of poems with musical accompaniment - how pretty will that be?

MassPoetry Blogger, Rhina Espaillat recently wrote:

"..during a recent visit I learned that the House now runs a series of Settlement Projects meant to reach, not just the community at large, but in particular the area's growing population of immigrant young people from various cultures, who need all the help they can get to become part of their new country. The Settlement Projects reach out to children and teens through programs that feature music, dance, the visual arts, language and literacy training, as well as career and college preparation.

And—of greatest interest to me as a writer and teacher—the newest program invites students to visit the House, use it as a resource for building familiarity with the period it represents, and goes on from there to explore how the past helps to create the present, and how it can teach us to shape the future. Those visits include a guided tour of the House, and an open-ended, informal Q & A session. Having once been cast as Mrs. Brewster in a play about the Puritans, at P. S. 94—not long after I had learned to speak English—I know how far such experiences can take the young mind toward empathy and a sense of belonging.

In addition, the House and its Settlement Programs sponsor a series of special events unrelated to the House itself, but intended to enlarge and build upon the growing cultural awareness of young people and foster their own creativity and desire to learn. For example, on February 14, at 7 p.m., the House is hosting a Melopoeia performance—a session of poems by various authors, including Federico Garcia Lorca—recited with a musical background. The performers—guitarist John Tavano, vocalist Ann Tucker, and two poets, Alfred Nicol and I—hope to interest the largely Spanish-speaking students in attendance, and their families, in music, in poetry, in the history behind the poems, and in the use of the arts to convey personal experience. There are plans afoot to extend these programs beyond Salem, to other communities of underserved young people."

For further information, please contact us at sevengablesblogger@gmail.com

or email us directly at The 7 Gables HERE.

Thank you for your virtual visit today!