What: Selected readings from the poetry of Rudyard Kipling
Where: Taos First Baptist Church
When: Monday, February 8th
Even in his own time, and through the intervening years, it has been fashionable to look down on the work of Rudyard Kipling, on account of his conservative, colonialist thinking, and his unpolished colloquial style. Regardless of what one may think about the glory and majesty of the British Empire, Joseph Rudyard Kipling remains one of the most powerful, influential, and disregarded voices in the English language.
Born December 30, 1865, in British colonial India, he was a journalist, novelist, poet, and observer par excellence of the human condition. Along with his American contemporary, O. Henry, Kipling legitimized and developed the art of the short story. His writing has a visceral intensity to it that puts the reader directly into the sights and smells of the exotic lands he wrote of, or the smokey parlors in which he wrote of them. He wrote of the common man, and, though not a military man himself, he had a special affinity for Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, with whom he rubbed shoulders in India. In his Barrack-Room Ballads, Kipling managed to capture not only the infantryman’s brogue, but his very soul. In other verses, he searches the breadth of the human experience, from the loftiest philosophies to the humblest of anecdotes.
On the evening of Monday, the eighth of February, join us for fellowship and tea, and the reading of a selection of Kipling’s greatest poems, read by Randy White and Dillon Grahn. Take a moment away from this hectic and cynical modern life, to remember with us a time when poetry reigned supreme among the arts, and enjoy with us the timeless power of one of the greatest masters of that art.