Tickets on sale for Oct. 5 PCPL 'Conversation with the Artists'

Tickets are now available for Putnam County Public Library's "A Conversation with the Artists: Norbert Krapf, Richard Fields and Gordon Bonham."

The library is hosting this special event that includes music, a photography exhibit and poetry from Indiana's former poet laureate, Norbert Krapf.

The library is hosting the special event, beginning at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 5.

Tickets are $25 and include price of admission and hors d'oeuvres catered by Almost Home. They can be purchased at the library or at Almost Home, and can be reserved by emailing contact information to press@putnam.lib.in.us.

The tickets will support the Putnam County Public Library Author Series Endowment.

IU Press describes "Songs in Sepia and Black and White" as "a collaboration born of a shared love of music, photography, poetry and Indiana, this book celebrates the history, literature, and art that informs the present and shapes our identity.

"Richard Fields' black-and-white and sepia photos are evocative imaginings of Norbert Krapf's poems, visual metaphors that extend and deepen their vision. Krapf's poems pay tribute to poets from Homer and Virgil to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Wendell Berry, and to singer-songwriters such as Woody Guthrie and John Lennon. They also explore the poet's German heritage, question ethnic prejudice and social conflict, and praise the natural world."

The book includes a cycle of 15 poems about Bob Dylan; a public poem written in response to 9/11, "Prayer to Walt Whitman at Ground Zero," "Back Home," a poem reproduced in a stained glass panel at the Indianapolis airport; and ruminations on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, "Questions on a Wall."

Krapf's collaboration with bluesman Gordon Bonham includes "The Voice," "Pig Belly Blues," "Goodnight, Irene" and "Poem for Myself" (or "Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy") by Etheridge Knight and "Woody Guthrie's Guitar Machine."

There will be an exhibit of Richard Fields' photographs, most of them included in the book, and a performance by Gordon Bonham (blues) backing Norbert's recitation of poems from the book.