Poetry Party

Three prize-winning poets will debut their new works at the library on Sunday, January 11, 2015, at 1:00 p.m. The public is invited to meet the poets and hear them read selections from their books. Copies will also be available for sale and signing.

Ruth F. Harrison of Waldport presents among the cat tales, illustrated by Anita Sue Andrews. Of this volume Jean Esteve says, “Real poems! About real cats! . . . a charming litter of rhyme, rhythm and whimsy, . . . gorgeous lines, quiet philosophy of acceptance of life’s uninvited surprises, and the extraordinary insight into the heart of the feline Other . . . clearly the work of a mature and accomplished poet.” Harrison is author of three chapbooks and four poetry collections, including her most recent West of 101 and How Singular and Fine.

Sue Parman of Hillsboro will read from The Carnivorous Gaze, which is, according to Brian Doyle (author of Mink River), “Thorny, witty, braided and woven and webbed, startling; dark and sweet and sad and funny; lines and passages that will haunt you for days; and behind it all a wry sharp intelligence and large open bruised heart. A terrific read.” Parman’s previous collection is The Thin Monster House from Finishing Line.

Sandra Mason of Seal Rock will share work from Lost and Found. Oregon book award finalist Toni Hanner remarks that these poems “display the poet's deep scholarship and her command of formal constraint, while at the same time they sing a wild love song to the body and the world of nature, jazz, lovers and loved ones. Mason's spirituality is woven through this diverse collection, culminating in the lovely, wry 'Taoist' poems. Her humor is never far from the surface in these poems, leading us easily from loss to light and back to inevitable loss. Lost and Found is an impressive collection.” Mason’s collection of poems based on the Chinese masters, Poems Along the Way, was released in 2012.

...for the bullied and the beautiful

I discovered Shane Koyczan for the first time at my stepdaughter’s high school graduation ceremony, when one of the young men in her class performed a poem entitled “Remember How We Forgot.” It really moved me, and I went home and downloaded it onto my MP3 player so that I could hear it again, and again, and again-- and investigated. Who is this Koyczan guy that he can get teenage guys to voluntarily perform poetry in front of huge crowds of people?

The answer is—he’s a Canadian spoken word poet and writer, and he’s amazing. His performance of his poem “To This Day: for the bullied and the beautiful” went viral on Youtube, and he performed it in a TED talk as well. In that poem, he shares his own experience of being bullied, and finding the strength not to internalize the cruelty. Here is a small piece, and I urge you to check out the full performance:

I’m not the only kid
who grew up this way
surrounded by people who used to say
that rhyme about sticks and stones
as if broken bones
hurt more than the names we got called
and we got called them all
so we grew up believing no one
would ever fall in love with us
that we’d be lonely forever
that we’d never meet someone
to make us feel like the sun
was something they built for us
in their tool shed

We just purchased a graphic novel version of To This Day, with beautiful emotive illustrations by thirty international artists. Check it out.

And click on the play button below to hear Koyzcan perform.

Love … Perish

Today I’m going to recommend a book that I know doesn’t sound very good when I summarize it.

It’s a short novel, a series of brief, sensitive vignettes about people whose lives are connected to each other by their actions - loving actions or cruel, selfish actions. And it’s written in verse.

I know. Stay with me.

The book is Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel by David Rakoff. The poetry is not beautiful stuff; it is a sort of jaunty, Noel-Cowardish doggerel that makes an interesting contrast to the sometimes quite serious tone of the stories.

In this snippet, for instance, Helen has been jilted by her married lover, who is also her boss:

The very next Monday, from others she heard, 

That, without her knowledge, he’d had her transferred. 

At least (tiny comfort) they didn’t demote her 

But Helen became what is known as a “floater.” 

Doing steno for this one, or helping with filing 

And through it all Helen made sure to keep smiling. 

The salt in the wound was the sight that then faced her, 

The looks he exchanged with the girl who’d replaced her. 

Once you get used to this - and I admit that it didn’t happen for me immediately - the power of the stories takes hold of you. They’re satirical, sharply-drawn, full of piercing observation and kindness and razor-blade wit. I really enjoyed reading it, and I know I’ll read it again.

Rakoff is known for his excellent essays and for his contributions to the NPR show This American Life.  (That link takes you to a really extraordinary live talk he did for This American Life; it's kind of long, but it's worth watching all the way through to the end.)

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish is the book Rakoff wrote as he was dying of cancer in 2012. It’s an ambitious and impressive gem of a book, one-of-a-kind, as entertaining and lovely as it is unusual. Next time you’re in the mood for something different pick it up.

Necessary Silence, Poetry by Lisa C. Taylor

The Newport Public Library is hosting a reading by poet Lisa C. Taylor on Wednesday, March 27, at 7:00 p.m. Taylor’s fourth poetry collection, Necessary Silence, was published in early 2013. Its poems explore the range of human vulnerability from strangers meeting in a grocery line, “forgetting how invisible we all are for most of our lives” to a Virgin Mary sighting. In this image rich collection, tones of despair and celebration comingle, “a parade of contrast” showing the resilience of the human spirit.

Taylor also has two published chapbooks Talking to Trees and Insufficient Thanks and a full-length collaborative collection of poetry with Irish poet and writer, Geraldine Mills, The Other Side of Longing. The Other Side of Longing was chosen for the Elizabeth Shanley Gerson Honor at University of Connecticut and both Taylor and her co-writer Mills were Lecturers of Irish Literature in 2011.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, and teaches part-time at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her honors include two AAUP Faculty Development Awards, a Pushcart nomination and several book finalist designations.

Taylor’s work has been widely published in many national and international journals and magazines such as Crannóg, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Worcester Review, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Pacific Review, Midwest Review and Connecticut River Review. She has also had poetry featured in two national anthologies, Written with a Spoon: A Poet’s Cookbook and XY Files: Poems on the Male Experience.

Taylor has been a guest on radio and television shows in Connecticut, Connemara and Galway, Ireland. She has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and will be in residence at Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland in 2013. For more information about the program, go to the library’s website at www.newportlibrary.org.

Poetry à Trois

The Newport Public Library is hosting a poetry reading on Sunday, January 6, at 1:00 p.m. Poets Sandra Ellston, Ruth F. Harrison, and Dorothy Blackcrow Mack will give readings from their latest works, debut volumes from Turnstone Books of Oregon. The three authors, who are all retired English professors and award-winning poets, are members of the Tuesday Writers.

Ruth F. Harrison is author of several volumes of poems. Her new work, "How Singular and Fine," is a substantial volume with poems in several established forms: the sonnet, villanelle, epic, ode, terza rima, and other lyric structures. Of these poems, Marjorie Power says they "show us a world both fresh and mysterious, like newly fallen snow when the sun breaks through."

Sandra Ellston is President of Writers on the Edge and a practitioner of t'ai chi. Her volume, "Poems Along the Way," consists of modern reworkings of ancient Chinese texts from the T'ang dynasty. These poems describe the joys and heartbreaks of life's journey and have been called calming and serene. Poet Matt Schumacher says that her book is a "Taoist treasure chest that frees fleeting flute notes and turtledoves thousands of years old, gives us pause under the 'study huts' of our ancestors, and braves the same mountain summits as the T'ang Dynasty's finest poets. A very old muse runs through these poems."

 Dorothy Black Crow Mack is President of the Coast Branch of Willamette Writers and is active in writing endeavors throughout Lincoln County. Her book, "Anuk-Ite': Double-Face Woman," honors "the elders who blessed her life on Pine Ridge Reservation. She writes for the 7th generation, the young ones coming, to share the stories." Her book is illustrated with personal portraits and images of life on the South Dakota reservation. Of Black Crow's poems, Oregon Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen says, "Black Crow has the wisdom and heart to do an ancient, ageless work: delving '. . . deep / to pull out all those designs / pricked in the night sky. . . ."

Each poet will read samples from her book and copies will be available for purchase at the event. This program is sponsored by Turnstone Books and the Newport Public Library. Admission is free and open to the public.

On the road, again!

New York poet Michael Czarnecki is traveling the length of US Highway 20, from Boston to Newport, writing poems and taking photos along the way. At the completion of his journey, he will share stories, haiku, poems, and photos at the Newport Public Library on Thursday, June 9 at 7:00 p.m.

“US 20 is the longest US highway,” said Czarnecki. “It connects the two coasts, crosses the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and takes you to Yellowstone National Park! Cities, small towns, rolling hills, eastern woodlands and farms, midwestern plains, wild western landscapes. What more could one want in a single route, a route that today is garnering much interest in its historic significance.”

This will be his second trip along US 20. Czarnecki made his first trip in the autumn of 1996, from Boston to Newport. From that journey came a book, “Twenty Days on Route 20,” a haibun (poetic prose and haiku) travel account of the experience, which is now in its second printing.

Czarnecki had originally scheduled this trip for 2010, and made it to Ohio before he was called home for a family emergency. He resumed his trip on May 19, 2011 from where he left off in Toledo, Ohio.

The program on June 9, sponsored by the Newport Public Library and the Elizabeth Street Inn, is free and open to the public.  You can follow Czarnecki's daily progress on his website, US Journey 2011.

A Christmas Wish

Jennifer reads A.A. Milne's poem, "King John's Christmas."

The Typewriter is Holy

I'm right in the middle of reading The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, by Bill Morgan. This book is a "quick and dirty" version of the lives of a very small group of nomadic writers who have influenced or infected – depends on your point of view – our culture for over 60 years.

The Beat Generation had its beginnings in the 1940s when a group of young college students and college student wannabees met, while hanging around bars and clubs near Columbia University in New York City. They liked to drink and talk about great writers and great writing. They had no desire or understanding that they would be instrumental in changing the culture of American society. They wanted to write and be left alone to live life on their own terms. The three most prominent of the group were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

The Beat writers were described in the press as: spontaneous, truth-seeking, imaginative, influential, lovers of individual freedom, artists, poets, writers and geniuses. Other descriptions were not as flattering. Many people characterized this group as prurient, sex-crazed, addicts, alcoholics, felons, murderers, self-destructive, lost, loiterers, bums, selfish, hedonists, motley, thieves, con men, nonconformists, misogynistic and rebellious. In truth, they were all of the above.

This history doesn’t pull any punches. Morgan was closely associated with Allen Ginsberg and had a lot of interaction with the people he writes about. The story he tells is indeed raw and uncensored. There are 16 pages of photos. One is heartbreaking: Kerouac just before he died – penniless, lost and alcoholic.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz
-- excerpted from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

If you appreciate Beat Generation writers, or if you’d like to get a better understanding of what “went down” back then, read this book. If you know nothing of the cultural history of the 50’s and 60’s, you’ll be surprised at the generational connections that come to light as these nomads crisscrossed the country.