Today I had another go at entertaining the clients of Glengarry with my reading group experiment.
We gathered about five people this time and I felt more prepared with some shorter pieces. I started off with some favourite poems like Auden's Funeral Blues and Thomas' Don't Go Gentle Into that Good Night. Then after some Kipling and Browning, I began to realise there is an overriding theme of death and dying in some of our best loved poems - not so great when you're at a nursing home! I decided to pass on the Plath and Hughes and opted for some cheerier material by the early Australian poets.
The group loved the Lawson and Patterson I had to hand, but the real hit of the day was an excerpt from CJ Dennis' A Sentimental Bloke, where the Bloke takes his sweetheart Doreen to see Romeo and Juliet. What follows is his rendition of the play and what he thinks of the Bard. You don't even need to ham up the accent, as it's all written phonetically. This was great fun to read, but the sparkly-eyed reaction was even better.