Finishing Line Press Reading at Multnomah County Library

5 Poets. 2 Hours. Finishing Line Press Reading at Multnomah County Library

Multnomah County Library, US Bank Room, 801 SW 10th Ave, Portland, OR 
 
Description Five renowned local poets and community builders, all of whom have chapbooks published through Finishing Line Press, are coming together for a single event at the Multnomah County Library on Wednesday, February 1.
Representing varied styles, voices, and ages, the poets ...(Don Colburn, David Hedges, Joseph A. Soldati, Leah Stenson, and John Sibley Williams) will be creating a Finishing Line Press “Best of” reading to launch their latest books.
Please join us in celebrating their releases and work!
Don Colburn is a freelance journalist and poet in Portland. He has published three collections of poems, most recently a chapbook titled Because You Might Not Remember. A longtime newspaper reporter for The Washington Post and The Oregonian, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, he has an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. His first two books, Another Way to Begin and As If Gravity Were a Theory, won national poetry manuscript contests. His poems have appeared in anthologies and many magazines, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest and Southern Poetry Review. His many writing honors include the Discovery/The Nation Award, the Finishing Line Press Prize, the Duckabush Prize for Poetry and a recent fellowship at The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. He is a board member of Friends of William Stafford. Web site: www.doncolburn.net

David Hedges free-lanced for 11 of his 33 years in journalism, public relations, advertising and politics. He is the author of Petty Frogs on the Potomac, political satire in verse (1997), and five poetry chapbooks: The Wild Bunch (1998), Brother Joe (2000), Steens Mountain Sunrise: Poems of the Northern Great Basin (2004), Selected Sonnets (2006), and A Funny Thing Happpened on My Way to a Geology Degree (2011). Poems have appeared in Able Muse, The Christian Science Monitor, Light Quarterly, Measure, Poet Lore, and Poetry. He was president of the Oregon Poetry Association and edited the prize-poem anthology, Verseweavers, for 12 years. He is on the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission board, and was on the Portland Poetry Festival board. He received the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life at the 2003 Oregon Book Awards. Web site: http://www.david.hedges.name/

Joseph A. Soldati is the author of a scholarly book, Configurations of Faust (1980), a poetry collection, Making My Name (1990), and is co-editor, with Eduardo González-Viaña, of a bilingual volume of poems by Peruvian and Oregonian poets entitled O Poetry! ¡Oh Poesía! Poems of Oregon and Peru (1997). He is a former Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Friends of William Stafford, and continues to be a member of that organization. Joseph holds degrees from Oglethorpe University (B.A.), the University of California at Santa Barbara (M.A.), and Washington State University (Ph.D.). Now retired, he is Professor Emeritus of English at Western Oregon University. Honors and awards for teaching and scholarship include two Fulbright Fellowships--lecturing in Egypt, 1983-84, and in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa, 1989-90. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his two cats, Roxanne and Tramp.

Leah Stenson is a published poet, workshop leader, Board Member of Friends of William Stafford, and coordinator and host of the prestigious Studios reading series in Portland. She has previously acted as Assistant Editor at Hawthorne Books and Managing Director of the Oregon Peace Institute, and she recently received the Ambassador of Peace Award from the SGI-USA. She is also Regional Editor of the upcoming Ooligan Press anthology The Pacific Poetry Project. Her chapbooks include East/West (William Stafford Institute at Lewis and Clark College, 2005) and Heavenly Body (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Publications include Oregon Literary Review, Colere, Northwest Women’s Journal, The Oregonian, Verseweavers, Lalitamba, and San Diego Poetry Annual.
Website: www.leahstenson.com

John Sibley Williams is the author of six chapbooks, winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. He has served as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and Publicist for various presses, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Book Publishing. Some of his over 200 previous or upcoming publications include: Bryant Literary Review, The Chaffin Journal, The Evansville Review, RHINO, Rosebud, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, and Poetry Quarterly. His websites: www.johnsibleywilliams.wordpress.com and www.TheArtOfRaining.com. 


http://www.finishinglinepress.com/index.php?page_id=2

playing bumper cars with the grim reaper

i have a coworker who i enjoy talking to and who is often good for a humorous rant and sometimes too good for a not-so-humorous rant. i've come to realize that talking to him can be a lot like bumper cars, which can be quite enjoyable if you do it very infrequently but could be quite tedious if did it every other day for years & years. so the realization i've had is that he's actually trying to bump cars, not deliberately, but unconsciously, which is a metaphor of harshly arriving at the conclusion he has already assumed, and thus, the collision. the game for me has become trying to avoid the depressing tedium of bumping into the same conclusions over & over again by asking questions that, if not avoiding the bump, at least extend the swerving time longer. or maybe the realization is that coming to a conclusion rhetorically is just driving closer & closer to death, and that every conclusion is a little death of the mind that inches me toward an absolute conclusion. questions are what keep the door ajar. questions keep me filled with breath.

Verse in Person Featuring Poets David Biespiel & Wendy Willis

Verse in Person resumes in 2012 with a reading by David Biespiel & Wendy Willis from 7-8 PM  at the Northwest Branch of the Multnomah County Library, NW 23rd & Thurman in Portland.

David Biespiel

President of the Attic Institute
David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and also one of the nation's experts in teaching writing. His teaching experience is innovative and vast: He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, from public high schools to graduate seminars, from teaching poetics at Stanford University to developing national champions in the Olympic sport of diving, and he has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States. Looking to create an independent writing studio in 1999, David founded the Attic Institute as a haven for writers in Portland's historic Hawthorne district. Among his publications are Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, The Book of Men and Women which was named Best Poetry of the Year for 2009 by The Poetry Foundation and also received the Oregon Book Award, and Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Since 2008, he as been a frequent contributor to Politico's "Arena," a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars. In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle where he serves as a judge for the NBCC annual book awards.

Wendy Willis

Adjunct Fellow at the Attic Institute
Wendy Willis has published her work in the internationally-acclaimed Alhambra Poetry Calendar, as well as in Poetry Northwest, Clackamas Literary Review, Bellingham Review, and elsewhere. In addition to her poetry career, Wendy is the deputy director for national programs at the Policy Consensus Initiative and the National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University. Prior to joining PCI/NPCC, Wendy was the executive director for City Club of Portland. She has also served as an assistant public defender for the District of Oregon and a law clerk to Chief Justice Wallace P. Carson, Jr. of the Oregon Supreme Court. Wendy is also a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum Oregon, and an active volunteer in the local food-to-school movement. She graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law Center and holds a BA from Willamette University. Listen to Oregon poets read from their works on the fourth Wednesday of every month. This program is organized by local poets to highlight two to three poets each reading.

http://atticwritersworkshop.com/content/experience-finest-poetry

Poets Sam Lohmann, Deborah Woodard & Ruby Murray 4pm Today @ Powells on Hawthorne

In his new collection, Stand on This Picnic Bench and Look North, Portland poet Sam Lohmann delves into the language of landscapes, which is unavoidably entangled in memory.

In American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (Stockport Flats), contributors Ruby Murray and Deborah Woodard present their reflections on the real costs of deindustrialization in manufacturing cities and their rural counterparts across the country.

Sunday, January 15th @ 4pm

Powell's Books on Hawthorne
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd. 

Talking Earth on KBOO Tonite with Trevino Brings Plenty & Leah Gibson

Patrick Bocarde is the host tonite for Talking Earth Radio Show at 10pm on KBOO. Tonite's show will feature local poets Trevino Brings Plenty & Leah Gibson. A member of Hurtbird and the Brothers Young, Trevino has also published "Real Indian Junk Jewelry" and "Removing Skin" among others. His work was published in "Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets" as well.

http://www.trevinobringsplenty.com/

http://kboo.fm/blog/856

"Stafford in Translation" Featuring Paul Merchant @ Stonehenge Studios 7pm Tonite

Paul Merchant was editor/translator of Modern Poetry In Translation 4 (1968), which included the first selection of Ritsos published in England. He is also the translator of Eleni Vakalo’s Genealogy (1971). He taught for many years at Warwick University before becoming William Stafford Archivist at Lewis & Clark College. Paul will talk about the translation of Stafford's poetry into various languages as well as Stafford's work as a translator of Spanish. Also featuring Cindy Gutierrez who will read Spanish Stafford translations, and Lars Nordstrom who will read his translations of Stafford into Norwegian.  

Attendees are invited to share a Stafford poem or anecdote at the open mic.

For more information about William Stafford celebrations:

http://www.williamstafford.org/

I am like a slip of comet by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“I am like a slip of comet,

Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen

Bridging the slender difference of two stars,

Come out of space, or suddenly engender’d

By heady elements, for no man knows;

But when she sights the sun she grows and sizes

And spins her skirts out, while her central star

Shakes its cocooning mists; and so she comes

To fields of light; millions of travelling rays

Pierce her; she hangs upon the flame-cased sun,

And sucks the light as full as Gideons’s fleece:

But then her tether calls her; she falls off,

And as she dwindles shreds her smock of gold

Between the sistering planets, till she comes

To single Saturn, last and solitary;

And then she goes out into the cavernous dark.

So I go out: my little sweet is done:

I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:

To not ungentle death now forth I run.”

                                              – Gerard Manley Hopkins

this morning i walked alone to discover what was closed

woke up woozy today, pulled
reluctant shades & attempted to
tie the untieable day that refused
to knot my spirit's knees hurt
from wearing too thin-soled
mocassins that absorb too much
street you never know what
a bright warm day really means
the first does not necessarily
describe the whole year is a
necklace, beaded with days...


last night we yelled yay
and flipped the calendar page
falling up and waking down
my life is not a staircase i say
leave the easy quiet to enter
the too quiet city still sleeping
off the previous year still unfinished


our dying is tall and almost
too bitter to drink.


swallowing the ash of this morning
that does not feel like the first though
it's pleasant, and will do. this morning
swears it's a village beside a volcano
that survived the annual tantrum, but
found us blinking and smothered in soot.


maybe the gulls know because there's a flock of them,
all lined up on the roof of an abandoned brick school,
windows patched with blonde boards, gulls perched
along the edge, facing this rare winter sun, while a few
dogs chase balls flung by cleaved hearts on the green


grass below. i continue past
the catholic church with its now
sleeping bell when something shiny
bends me down to grasp a tiny,
metallic butterfly wing, which i pocket
for a future to give to anyone who will
pour me some warm flesh.


this morning i walked alone
to discover what was closed.