William di Canzio and Jo Ann Miles Miller will join us on November 11 at 7:00 PM for a reading and an exhibition opening!
About the Event
Wiiliam di Canzio — “I stopped to read a familiar poem displayed in large type on a poster in a shop window on Germantown Avenue:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row,
that mark our place, and in the sky
the larks, still bravely singing, fly
scarce heard amid the guns below...
It was mid-October, and the shop was housing a temporary exhibition of photographs of poppies. Inside, I found the poppies in the photos weren’t flowers: they were sculptures of the red paper poppies we associate with Veterans Day—Armistice Day. The poppies were enormous, ten feet tall, with petals of aluminum sheetrock, and yet engineered with such refinement that they moved on their stems with the wind, like the poppies in the poem—three hundred of them!
The gallerist, Jo Ann Miles Miller, told me the photos were an archive of the work of her late husband, Gary G. Miller, called Papaver Rubrum Giganteum, first installed in the gardens of the Morris Arboretum in 2008. He’d been moved by the poppies, their symbolism of mourning for the Great War, “the war to end all wars,“ and by the poem as well.
I told Jo Ann about my own work. I’d written a novel whose two young heroes serve in the British army in the Great War, one of them in Gallipoli, the other on the Western Front in France near Flanders. His name is Alec. At the very moment of the armistice, at 11AM on November 11, 1918, Alec witnesses the death of a brother-in-arms by his side in the trenches. I offered to hold a reading from my work in the gallery among the photos, to mourn and honor the dead, as Jo Ann’s husband had.
Last year, I visited the American Cemetery in Normandy, sacred to those who died in the war that caused the Great War to be renamed World War I. They gave us paper poppies there. At home I tucked them into the pages of Alec.
…If ye break the faith with us who die,
we shall not sleep, though poppies grow
in Flanders fields.”
About the Author and Artist
William di Canzio’s plays--including the award-winning Dooley and Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier--have been staged in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Philadelphia; at Yale University and the O’Neill Theater Center; and at the National Constitution Center. Di Canzio has taught literature and writing at Smith College, Haverford College, and Yale University. Since 2013, he has taught in the Pennoni Honors College of Drexel University.
Jo Ann Miles Miller is a corporate attorney by profession. Originally from Georgia, Jo Ann has lived and worked in Philadelphia for some 25 years. She has been a devotee and supporter of the visual arts since early adulthood and has many close friends who are artists. She believes strongly in the power of art to heal individuals and communities. She is a graduate of Stephens College and attended law school at Emory University and the University of Virginia.