• June 9: Kelly Cherry with Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Trevor Bobola & Julia Holemans
• June 16: Pia Taavila & Ian Williams
• June 23: Adam Tavel & Melissa Tuckey
• June 30: Yvette Neisser Moreno & Iain Pollock
• July 7: Hailey Leithauser & Suzanne Rhodenbaugh
• July 14: Benjamin S. Grossberg & Michele Wolf
• July 21: Joe Bueter & Lynn Wagner
• July 28: Michael Gushue & Jennifer Militello

Although the series will no longer take place at the cabin in Rock Creek Park, we are more than pleased with the new space.

We’ll be indoors with comfortable seats, air conditioning for those who need it, and a handy reception space. We will also have the option of reading inside or outside, so we will always, always have a “rain” location at the ready (and at the exact same address).

Thursday evenings at 7:00 at the Rock Creek Nature Center, 5200 Glover Road, NW, Washington, DC near the intersection of Military & Glover roads. Sign up for opening reading at 7 pm. Wheelchair accessible. Nature Center is located at the far north side of the Horse Stables. For more information, call Kathi Morrison-Taylor at 703-820-8113.

No Shoes Required for this Kind of Poetry Reading

Online journals, workshops, and literary relationships existing entirely online have reinvigorated poetry and hardened it against accusations of it being a dying art. Part of this effect, I’m sure, is the immediacy that the internet can provide. An immediacy which HTMLGIANT is using to its fullest with their series of ‘Live Giants’ online poetry readings. Can’t get to New York or Chicago to experience Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey read? Just tune in online, instead. To be honest, the virtual ‘crowd’ that gathers for these readings is larger than most poetry readings I’ve ever been to. Not only does it allows the wonderful poems to be heard by people who are geographically inaccessible, but it provides yet another online platform for poetry folk to come together. Who doesn’t enjoy a love-in? Ok, so the animal masks are a little scary, but it all adds to the experience. HTMLGIANT are up to number 8, and previous readings have included Mairéad Byrne, Zachary Schomburg and Sam Lipsyte

Best of all, HTMLGIANT’s archives mean you can replay the readings over and over and over until your heart’s content. It’s always frustrating when you grow to love a poet’s work after you’ve seen them live and can’t quite recall the poems in the same way. Well now you can, whenever you like. Doing laundry, cleaning, jumping up and down… the possibilities are endless.

Who wouldn’t want poets in animal masks reading you to sleep?

Flowers for the Poets

Now that I’m back home for a bit, I wondered what a poetry reading would look like on Twitter. How does one give a poetry reading on Twitter? What do we poets do there?

Susan Rich, Kelli Agodon, January O’Neill, D.A. Powell, Collin Kelley, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil agreed to join me (Deborah Ager) in a poetry reading/party online in front of all who care to join. On the basis of their agreement to join me, I can attest to their adventurous natures.

The Twitter Poet Party may be nothing like a reading. You will not be at a college in a comfortable seat or in a bar with a beer. You will not get extra credit for attending. You might be at home in a comfortable seat with a beer. That could be good, right? You don’t have to wear shoes. You don’t have to talk to anyone. To communicate, you will have to type. If you have a sexy voice, it will do you no good. You can lurk and people won’t think you’re weird, because no one has to know you’re lurking. Are you seeing the possibilities?

Please join Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kelli Agodon, January O’Neill, D.A. Powell, Deborah Ager, Collin Kelley, and Susan Rich for this Twitter Poet Party. Follow the #poetparty hashtag. Ask questions. “Listen” to poems. Sunday, October 24 @ 9 pm ET. As you may know, a hashtag looks like this #poetparty and helps people focus on certain conversations on the constantly moving stream that is Twitter.

Oh! The flowers in the photo? They are for the poets, and they’ll never dry out.

Although I can’t recreate the poetry reading for you, I can share a video of her poem “Parts of Speech.”

Parts of Speech from Holly Karapetkova on Vimeo.

McBreen is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Heather Island. She has put together several significant anthologies of Irish poetry, including The White Page: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets. McBreen’s is a poetry of memory and rooted in the Irish landscape of her various homes in Sligo and Galway. She enters into the Irish poetic tradition of emotional geography, mapping her relationships onto the surrounding terrain. It is a terrain traversed by Michael Longley and Eamon Grennan, who are McBreen’s neighbours both in Ireland and in Emory’s archives.

Personally, it’s incredibly exciting to have access to such a wealth of material, and I cannot wait to explore them. Still, something seems not quite right with the situation. Ireland has an immense cultural heritage and, as recently highlighted in Brian Cowen’s inaugurating speech for Harry Clifton as Ireland Professor of Poetry, poets are particularly elevated within the Irish arts. So surely the archives and manuscripts of Ireland’s brightest literary stars belong on their home turf? Emory’s collection even includes the papers of the Nobel laureate and arguably Ireland’s second largest export (after Guinness, of course), Seamus Heaney, despite the fact that Queen’s University Belfast has a wonderful centre for poetry named after him.

To look at it negatively, this collection could be viewed as cultural theft. Or it could just be admiration. So, is a nation’s literary heritage bound to geographical borders? Or is it free to the highest bidder?

Caroline Crew is on Fellowship at Emory University in Atlanta, GA for 2010-2011. She is an editorial assistant at 32 Poems.

Although August has not ended and we’re still having
90-degree days, it’s felt like September for several weeks
in terms of work load.

Recently, I finished a poetry interview for the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival. Next up, I’ll be packing to head south for the Decatur Book Festival where the wonderful Blue Elephant Books of Decatur, GA will sell books.

Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 11:15 am: Decatur Book Festival
Eddie’s Attic
Decatur, GA
Poetry reading with Sabrina Orah Mark and Ron Egatz

September 10, 2010: NPR interview airs
Baltimore NPR station
On radio and via internet webcast

Friday, September 24, 2010: Stain of Poetry
Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY 11221-3013
Readers: William Joseph Friend, Eric Amling, Sean Singer, Deborah Ager

October 1-3, 2010: Sotto Voce Poetry Festival
Shepherdstown, WV
Panel with Peter Stitt of Gettysburg Review
Poetry Reading

October 7-28, 2010: The Writer’s Center
508 Walsh Street
Bethesda, MD 20815
First Poetry Books Class
In this course, we’ll read and discuss four first poetry books in order to hone our critical eye while discovering what contributes to creating a cohesive poetry collection. We’ll spend one class period discussing each book. Books: Amy Lemmon’s Saint Nobody, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Miracle
Fruit, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Becoming the Villainess, and Charles Jensen’s The First Risk.

Online Poetry Class
Take this poetry course from anywhere.
October, 2010

The Series is located in a lovely outdoor park setting in the Washington, D.C., with two readers selected (one local and one from another part of the country) for each of eight Tuesday evenings.

A very small honorarium is given.

If you would like to apply, please send five poems, a paragraph bio, and a letter-size SASE for reply to:

Rosemary Winslow
Department of English
Catholic Univesity of America
Washington, DC 20064.

Please, no repeats if you have read in the series in the past four years.

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks…

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From whence came the term “creative nonfiction”?

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This weekend, I’m deciding between beach, art museum, beach, art museum. Maybe both?

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In a few weeks, I’ll be reading in Hoboken at the DeBaun Center and then in Princeton, NJ with Amy Lemmon.

See details below and please come by if you’ll be around.

12:00pm
Poetry of Independent Presses
Thu, September 24, 12pm – 1pm
M&T Bank Tent, Outside the Johnson Center, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030
Poets Deborah Ager and Charles Jensen read from their first books, both published with independent publishers.

List of participants at Fall for the Book.

Joaquin Miller Poetry Series is Sponsored by the Word Works

I felt fortunate to be in the audience tonight to listen to these talented writers. In April, the directors of the reading series had the difficult job of choosing which people to read. Seeing the series come to life with poetry I’d formerly only read on the page was a rare pleasure.

Bernhardt read the majority of her poems from her book Echolalia and the audience laughed in all the right places and even applauded. Sulak read a number of food poems — “Chipotle” was a favorite of mine — and fascinated the audience (and probably made them hungry) with her personification of food.

About Deborah Bernhardt:
She received a BA in English/Art History/Photography from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center/Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Summer Literary Seminars/St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her work appears in recent issues of Court Green, Cue, and Fence. Her first poetry collection, Echolalia, was published by Four Way Books.

About Marcela Sulak:
Sulak teaches courses in poetics, world poetry, world literature and translation. Her collections of poetry include Immigrant (forthcoming) and the chapbook Of All The Things That Don’t Exist, I Love You Best (2008). Her three book-length translations include 19th-century Czech poetry and contemporary poetry from Zaire (Congo). She is currently completing a scholarly study called “1920s New York as a Construction Site for American Identity” which examines book-length poems about New York written by immigrant, migrant and foreign poets.

POETRY READING SERIES SCHEDULE —SUMMER 2009

Tuesday evenings at 7:30 at the Joaquin Miller Cabin in Rock Creek Park, Picnic Area #6, Beach Drive at Military Road Overpass. Sign up for opening reading at 7:15 pm. For more information and rain location, call Kathi Morrison-Taylor at 703-820-8113.

* June 16 —Tyler Caroline Mills with Jacklyn Potter Young Poets:
Katherine Casey & Baobao Zhang
* June 23 —Chris Goodrich & Nancy Krygowski
* June 30 —Melanie Henderson & Luke Johnson
* July 7 — April Linder & Bonnie Naradzay
* July 14 — George Drew & W. Luther Jett
* July 21 — Cynthia Atkins & Dan Vera
* July 28 — January Gill O’Neil, Joseph O. Legaspi & Joseph Ross