This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Any day now you may be approached and asked to sign a petition to designate the whole Rock Island area as The Joy Golisch Theater. The gentle bluffs sloping down to the river on both sides make it a natural stage. And the name fits.
Joy Golisch bounced into our Rock Island lives in the late ‘70s as a college student, bringing with her from Chicago a new art form known as Performance Poetry which blurred the distinction between who was poet and who was audience. In dorm rooms, coffee houses, city parks and even classrooms the beat of her words brought listeners into the circle. Rock Islanders who never knew they had feet discovered they could dance; those who thought they had no voice discovered they were poets and performers. Part whirling dervish, part Indian trickster, a hybrid of spring storm and tornado, Joy never stayed in one place long. There was always another poem. Then there was a collection of her poems, Surfing with Monkeys.
And then she died. Thirty-six. Leukemia. Leaving us all alone on the stage—and, for the moment, without Joy. At her memorial service in the spring of 1996, the lives she had touched converged to say thanks: a motley crew homeless, drifters, professors, witches, roommates, lovers, feminists and farmers. Mourners blew soap bubbles which floated on the air a few seconds and then broke.
The committee to rename this valley the Joy Golisch Theater discussed making Moline the balcony and Davenport the main floor in this scheme. Representatives from Bettendorf, of course, claimed the box seats.
Until the committee realized that there were no seats at all. What Joy Golisch taught us all in her brief tenure as resident director of performance poetry was that each life is a performance poem, and that the only choice you and I have is between a performance that is lackluster, and one in which we are inspired to do our best, a performance that is vibrant with dancing and laughing and crying—and full of Joy.
You need not wait until they come around with the petition.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
