Poetry at 1515 Lincoln Gallery, August 2026

This was my first visit to Oklahoma Poets House at 1515 Lincoln Gallery. I attended after a Lost Street poet, Ron Wallace, shared the event on social media.

The venue is elegant, and the writing and readings were lush and honest.

The featured poet was Scott LaMascus.

Solo and the Narratives, a response to Solo by Paul Juhasz

by Richard R. Barron

“They create narratives about you,” he wrote about hiking alone. “Sometimes you’ll be a widower. But most times, the stories are less charitable.”

Yes, the note about bring a widower. I am a widower, so much so that I assume they can see her in my eyes, hear her in the thinness of my voice, taste her in my quick and innocent tears when I as much as smile at them.

Or I erase all doubt when I incant, “Abby loved it here.”

But maybe Paul was thinking of the blinding, acidic poison of junior high bullying when the 78-IQ boys would accuse you of being gay while not really knowing what it meant.

“Hey, Richard! Are you a fag?”

Remembering all those times summons the desire for violence, which is alien to me. But now that I am in my 60s, all that is tempered by the notion that their lives are as terrible today as they were in 1976.

In many ways, I am beyond caring what stupid people think of me, and most people are stupid. Joe Sixpack and his boy and his fourth wife and her two girls might imagine me as a homo or a creep, but they have no idea who I am.

Sometimes I think about all the potentially interesting people I knew, especially when I was young, and I halfway expected they would be like the people I meet at open mic events I attend. Was that my plan for them? Would be become a commune of writers, poets, singers, actors, painters? But for most of them, that’s long been over. They were buried alive by their lives, swallowed in their easiest ideas of happiness, whether they were happy or not.