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Open Books: Readings
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February 2012
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3 JOSEPH GREEN & ELIZABETH MYHR
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21 CAROL GUESS
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March 2012
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9 CHRISTOPHER HOWELL
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18 KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN
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22 MIKE O'CONNOR & SHIN YU PAI
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29 CAROL V. DAVIS
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Friday, February 03, 2012 at 07:30 PM
JOSEPH GREEN & ELIZABETH MYHR
This evening’s reading pairs two poets whose approaches to poetry differ from one another, providing an interesting opportunity to experience two vibrant tonal threads in the art form.
Joseph Green is a letterset-press printer and retired college teacher in Longview, Washington. His most recent book, That Thread Still Connecting Us ($10 MoonPath), braids lyric mediations on recollections of his childhood and, later, the deaths of his mother, grandfather, and father. The tone of his poems is straightforward, his language representing the physical experience of trying situations, generally without abstraction. Green’s recollections of incidents at the end of old age are poignant, detailed, and told with simple candor --
The night I hauled my father down
to emergency I had to get him dressed first.
It was about as simple as greasing up a snake
and sliding it back into the dry skin it had split out of.
The awareness of the metaphors inside the lived experience is striking, as when Green describes a fight occurring between his grandfather and father as the family prepared to move --
… they leaned
into one another, grunting and clutching,
shouting themselves out of breath.
Staggering under the weight of something
neither one of them was ever going to drop.
Samuel Green (no relation), the first Poet Laureate of Washington State, wrote of this book, “these are, ultimately, poems of redemption, forgiveness, understanding, the scraps of a life saved up, puzzled over, and put to use.”
Seattle poet and editor Elizabeth Myhr holds an M.F.A. from Seattle Pacific University. Her first collection of poetry, the vanishings ($15 Calypso) begins, “I have left for a country // where the ancient loneliness restores itself.” The poems that follow are strongly imagistic, conveying loss, passion, and the experience of urban and decidedly non-urban landscapes. Myhr’s work features figurative language; rather than attempting to relate an experience, it seeks to recreate that experience for the reader. Her effort shows clearly in the vivid, rainy, present-tense urban poem “night geographies,” where the tone lives in the sound of the street -- “tires krish krish nearby krish wipers tick run tick.”
The poet Ilya Kaminsky writes, “[Myhr] is able to be a realist and to step outside of time, often in the same poem.” Here is an example from her poem “red rock canyon oklahoma” --
late march the wind a dry bone
flat miles of grass asleep
steep road into the canyon
river nothing but a braided stream
and I bent to that water like an anchorite
climbs into the lap of god
and into the hills behind the canyon creek I climbed
into the heart shape of the junipers
Joseph Green’s and Elizabeth Myhr’s aesthetic differences highlight the choices a poet makes in the act of creation. It’s a pleasure to represent these two sides of the multisided poetry coin on one evening.
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 07:30 PM
CAROL GUESS
Carol Guess joins us to read from Doll Studies: Forensics (Black Lawrence Press), a collection of poems based on The Nutshell Studies Of Unexplained Death, crime-scene dioramas that were created by Frances Glessner Lee in the 1940s and 1950s and later photographed by Corinne Botz. Guess is the author of two novels, Seeing Dell and Switch; a memoir, Gaslight; and three poetry collections, Femme's Dictionary, Tinderbox Lawn, and Love is a Map I Must Not Set on Fire. She is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches Creative Writing and Queer Studies.
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Friday, March 09, 2012 at 07:30 PM
CHRISTOPHER HOWELL
Christopher Howell returns to our podium to read from Gaze ($16 Milkweed Editions), his tenth collection. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Washington State Book Awards, and his work has three times been included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches at Eastern Washington University and is also director of Willow Springs Books, as well as director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.
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Sunday, March 18, 2012 at 03:00 PM
KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN
This afternoon we celebrate the arrival of Kathleen Flenniken's second collection, Plume ($24.95 University of Washington Press), which draws on her years as a child and an adult in Richland, Washington, a community closely connected to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Kathleen Flenniken’s first book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press and president of the board at Jack Straw, Seattle's audio arts center.
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Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 07:30 PM
MIKE O'CONNOR & SHIN YU PAI
Poet, writer, and translator of Chinese literature Mike O'Connor joins us to read from his latest collection, Immortality ($16 Pleasure Boat Studio). For twelve years he farmed and worked in the woods before spending fifteen years pursuing Chinese studies and a journalism career in Asia. The author of nine books of poetry, translation, and memoir, he serves as publisher of Empty Bowl Press, a writers’ co-operative, in Port Townsend, Washington, and caretakes forest land on the Big Quilcene River.
Shin Yu Pai returns to Seattle to read from her latest collection, Adamantine ($16 White Pine Press). The author of seven earlier books of poetry, she is also an oral historian, photographer, and editor. She is the associate director of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation for Language and Literature at Hendrix College in Arkansas and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in Museology from the University of Washington.
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Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 07:30 PM
CAROL V. DAVIS
Los Angeles author Carol V. Davis visits to share her latest book, Between Storms ($15.95 Truman State University Press). Her first collection, Into the Arms of Pushkin, received Truman State's T. S. Eliot Prize. She was a senior Fulbright scholar in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1996-97 and 2005 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California.
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Friday, April 06, 2012 at 07:30 PM
ANDREW FELD
Raptor is the title of Andrew Feld's second collection, due in March from the University of Chicago Press, and indeed its poems have birds of prey as their focus. He is also the author of Citizen, which was selected for the National Poetry Series. He holds an MFA from the University of Houston and has received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, as well as a James Michener Foundation grant, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, and two Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the University of Washington and is the editor-in-chief of The Seattle Review.
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Friday, April 13, 2012 at 07:30 PM
TODD BOSS & MATTHEW NIENOW
Following his well received first collection, Yellow Rocket, Todd Boss's new book, Pitch ($24.95 Norton) has now been published, and he travels from St. Paul, Minnesota, to read from it this evening. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The London Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Best American Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His first libretto, Panic, a verse retelling of Knut Hamsun’s Pan, will premiere in Fall 2012, as a piece composed by Boston Conservatory’s Andy Vores. He is a co-founding co-director of Motionpoems, a new poetry film initiative collaborating with Scribner’s Best American Poetry.
Matthew Nienow is the author of three chapbooks, most recently The End of the Folded Map ($15 Codhill Press), as well as The Smallest Working Pieces and Two Sides of the Same Thing. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, the University of Washington, and 4Culture. A resident of Port Townsend, Washington, he works as a boat builder and all around handyman.
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