Street Stories: The Epoch poets

(WPRI) - Two-thousand years of experience is composed into the spoken word that covers just about everything from birth to marijuana with several stops along the way.

This week on Street Stories, we bring you to Epoch Assisted Living in Providence for a few readings from Life, Loss, Love.

We start from a beginning. Naomi Gitman’s.

“It was very dark and depressing in mother’s stomach,” she says, reading her poem about birth.

“And I had a wonderful experience, going through the birth canal,” she tells us with a laugh between lines of her poem.

“When she drank liquor,” the 88-year-old and spry Gitman reads. “I somehow giggled and gyrated so she would know I liked it.”

Together, this group of seniors writes and reads and if you convey their words for them do not miss a single inflection. I stumbled reading Dodo Hirsch’s work and heard this.

“I think you should read it again,” she told me with a firm smile.

I listened and read…again… her poem about not having water in her apartment.

“Are you o.k., do you now have hot water. Well, shouldn’t I oughter?” I read, under pressure but flawlessly.

Joe Katz is married to Ceil.

“I’m trying to write a book about the nine lives of Katz,” Joe says with a chuckle.

A couple of those lives involved him escaping the Russian revolution and her, the Holocaust.

“It was ideal to pass all these farms, blue flowers of linseed weaving like the ocean,” Ceil says, bringing you back to Argentina where her family escaped.

This started as a class, taught by Brown Professor Rick Benjamin. It bloomed into what they are reading. Abe Gershman turned 87 on the day we visited and remembers working downtown.

“The old Boston store.1947. 21 bucks a week.”

But like many of his fellow Epoch Poets he didn’t write, read or appreciate the crafted word until now.

“It gets right into you. And you want to produce something.”

Buy the book and the money will go into a scholarship fund. Life, Loss, Love is dedicated to David Horvitz, one of the original Epoch Poets.