On Sunday, July 26, Norbert and Monika Herzig did a jazz and poetry performance at the weekly Perk Up “Kafffeeklatsch” sponsored by Jeanette Footman, who sells her excellent German pastries. One year before, Jeanette supplied complimentary peach crumb cake for Norbert’s Poet Laureate party and performance with Monika at the old American Cabaret Theatre on the top floor of the Athenaeum, originally called Das Deutsche Haus. The German community of Indianapolis and central Indiana often gathers on Sunday at Perk Up, at 6536 Cornell Street in Broad Ripple, near the Monon Trail. Ironically, Norbert’s singer-songwriter friend Greg Ziesemer lived in this house in the 1980s.

On Sept. 12, Monika Herzig, Pieter Kienle, and Norbert kicked off The Festival of the Book in the Putnam County Public Library, Greencastle,  organized by Margot Payne, Library Director. The Carnegie Room, pictured below, is the same room the Airpoets read in last December. Norbert devised a set list that focused on books and authors, the American Songbook, teaching and learning, and paid tribute to teachers in the audience, a much undervalued group today. James Alexander Thom, who wrote the Forword for Norbert’s Bloodroot, followed with a talk from his forthcoming book, The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction. For a slide show on the whole Festival, go to http://www.putnam.lib.in.us/. Thanks to the Putnam County Public Library for all but the first and last of these photos.

On Sept. 24 as part of the yearlong Mahler Project organized by Dean Peter Alexander of the Jordan College of Fine Arts, Norbert, Monika Herzig, Carolyn Dutton, and Claudia Grossman performed “Buried Treasures: Recovering German Heritage through Poetry and Music” in the Johnson Room of Robertson Hall, where Norbert and Katherine’s daughter Elizabeth gave her senior violin recital in 2002 as a Butler student and where Norbert read his poems in early 1998. The program included original poems by Norbert, six early poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, in the German read by Claudia and Norbert’s English translations, and a famous Matthias Claudius poem, “Abendlied”/Evening Song much beloved in Germany as a children’s song, all paired with music by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schumann, Hoagy Carmichael,  and Monika Herzig, as well as with German folksongs. Monika also played two instrumentals, one her original and another by May Aufderheide, the Indy “Queen of Ragtime,” as part of the program.

This performance required a lot of preparation. In January, Norbert met with Diane Timmerman of the Theatre Dept. to discuss a possible program. Norbert, Monika, and Claudia met in Norbert’s downtown house on Feb. 28, after the Poetry Out Loud State Finals at Central Library, to go over a tentative set list created by Norbert. After Norbert then paired down the set list, Monika paired the poems with musical compositions. After dividing the German poems and Norbert’s translations into call and response sections at the Feb. 28 meeting, Norbert and Claudia met twice to rehearse their German and English recitations, all four performers rehearsed, putting the poetry and music together. Some days before the full rehearsal, Norbert also met with Diane Timmerman and the campus facilities manager to work out the setup of the room for the evening.
 

German wine, pastries (by Jeanette Footman) and savories (by Alice) were available for purchase, along with CDs and books, before the performance and during the intermission. At the start of the program, Norbert told the audience that the evening began almost forty years ago when he arrived in the New York area to begin teaching at Long Island University and began to trace his family history, study German in adult ed classes at a local high school, and write poems. “This has been a long journey that led to tonight,” he said.