Sage Said So

August 10: Pinot Passion Poetry Picnic

HELVETIA WINERY in Hillsboro OR with  Kay Reid and Paulann Petersen, invite you to:

The Almost Annual PINOT PASSION POETRY PICNIC
An afternoon of poetry in a peaceful, rural setting

SUNDAY AUGUST 10th
2 - 7 p.m.

READING POETS
3 - 4   p.m.
Peter Sears, Joan Maiers Fran Adler, Barbara LaMorticella

5 - 6 p.m.
Sara Guest, John Morrison, Sage Cohen, Dan Raphael

Open mikes between readings.

BYO poetry, picnic, and passion. Wine available onsite.

Get Directions to Helvetia Winery
503-647-7596

Don't miss the revival of the Pinot Passion Poetry Picnic and wine tasting at Helvetia Vineyards. This is an idyllic setting -rolling lawns, big trees, picnic benches, and plenty of spots to spread out a blanket and lounge. The turn-of-the-century farm house (site of the day-long wine tasting) is surrounded by inviting grounds, which are backed by vineyards. This is a good spot for kids lots of room to run and play. So bring your picnic lunch/dinner, and bring a poem or two for the open mike. Let’s have a summer poetry gala at one of Oregon’s loveliest wineries, a setting justly fabled for its sylvan beauty.

small stones: a year of moments by fiona robyn

Every day, a small stone from Fiona Robyn arrives by email shortly before I go to sleep. Each stone is a place marker for that day--a little glimpse into the wonder of life--a fragment of poetry that offers a palpable moment of carefully observed grace. From the glittering to the bruised, the mundane to the magnificent, I look forward to these small stones as I would a visit from a friend or the taste of a rare dessert. Thus, when I learned that Fiona was compiling these offerings into a book, small stones: a year of moments, I was thrilled!

What I love most about small stones: a year of moments, is the intimacy of it. We travel through time with the author--with chapters/stones organized by month--and splash in and out of moments lit by imagery that wakes up our senses. Consider this small stone from January:

The sun sags in the sky. Half a lemon sits face down in a puddle, scenting the water with citrus. Everything tightens against the cold.

I can see, taste and feel the weight of early winter in this small stone. And from April, this light kiss of sound and image:

a digger tips its scoop: the sand slides out as if from a cupped palm

July's full-body invitation awakened me to my own full-blooming truths this month:

Lie on your back on the grass, become quiet. One by one, they step forward. The chopped circle of the moon. Honeysuckle scent edging the breeze. Swallows weaving counterpoint, and above them and aeroplane in poor imitation. And next door's roses, punching holes into the evening, as red as the reddest lipstick.

In each moment, Fiona gives us something deeply perceived and fully felt. It's as if we are offered again and again a cup of fresh sustenance from the source that is language itself. Fiona concludes her introduction with an observation about how collecting small stones has impacted her:

As time went on, I got better at remembering to notice the world around me. Not just to notice it but to scrutinize it, engage with it, love it. My eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hands opened up.

I experience her book very similarly. It is both an invitation and a meditation...to enter my own depths and pay attention. To express my love of language through use...to receive each small stone as a holy, ordinary thing. And to live my life in humble service to the words that lead the way.

I'd highly recommend that you keep small stones: a year of moments close at hand and refer to it often. You just may find your whole body opening up a little more fully to the mysteries of our world.

Read "Bridal" in The Oregonian

My poem "Bridal" was featured in The Sunday Oregonian yesterday! You can view it online or, even better, read the poem as it was written--with line breaks--below.

Bridal

The pond drifts its corsages
along the withered wrists
of trees fallen too soon.
The broken vow folds
its paper wings.
No boat, no confetti, today
the leaving falls away
to a float of daisies.
Each opens her hungry yellow
throat to the rain’s staccato,
trodden banks, the simple
untamed thrill of hope. 

Barnes & Noble Reading Series presents Diane Averill, Casey Bush and Carla Perry

When: Wednesday, August 20, 7:00 p.m.

Where:
Barnes & Noble
1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section
Portland, OR 97232
503-249-0800

Diane Averill is the author of Branches Doubled Over With Fruit (1991) and Beautiful Obstacles (1998), both finalists for Oregon Book Awards. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Tar River Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Carnegie-Mellon Anthology of Poetry, and, most recently, Deer Drink the Moon: An Anthology of Native Poems by Oregon Writers. Her third chapbook, For All That Remains, was published in May 2007. She teaches at Clackamas Community College when she isn't hiking trails in the Columbia Gorge or the Olympic Peninsula.

Casey Bush is a senior editor of The Bear Deluxe Magazine and an Irradiated Poet. His most recent collection is “Poems of the Bush Administration: Free Speech in a Season of Fascism” (2008, Unimpressed Press).

Carla Perry is the founder of the nonprofit Writers On The Edge and the Nye Beach Writers' Series, now in its 12th year; 300 authors have been featured thus far. For her “outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life,” Perry received the Stewart Holbrook Special Award at the Oregon Book Awards, an Oregon State Governor's Art Award, and numerous literary fellowships and residencies. She also was awarded an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop with a BA in Creative Writing/Poetry. Her poetry, essays, interviews, and short stories have been published widely. Her photos of people, mostly writers, have won awards and been used in numerous publications. She is the owner of Dancing Moon Press, a book production company.

Hosted by: Sage Cohen

To Hold

By Li-Young Lee

So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I'm lucky,
she'll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

The Rider

By Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

Get Your Words in the World with Liz Prato

Are you ready to submit your stories, poems and essays to literary journals & magazines, but aren't sure how it all works?

In this class, Liz Prato will help you untangle the sometimes dizzying process of publishing your work, including doing research, writing cover letters, tracking submissions, and dealing with rejection. After this class, you’ll be armed with information to go charging into the world of publishing. There will be lots of discussion, so come with questions.

Liz Prato’s prize-winning fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. She thinks all writing classes should be lively conversations where everyone contributes to the word party. You can reach her at: lizprato@comcast.net.

Wednesday, July 9th
6:30 p.m—. - 9:00 p.mm
Multnomah Arts Center
Cost: $25
Register here

Two great poetry workshops at writers' conferences this summer!

If you're going to be at the PNWA or Willamette Writers conference this summer, come on by and say hello! You'll find me teaching these workshops:

Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference
Friday, July 18
1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Location: San Juan

Taking Your Poetry Out of the Closet and into the World

Make 2008 your year for establishing a submissions system that gets your poetry in the public eye. In this interactive workshop, participants will learn about the seven habits of widely published poets. They will be supported in developing their own personal action plans that align their poetry with the publications and contests where they are most likely to get noticed. Participants will learn how to identify the right publications, contests, prizes and residencies for their work and much more.

Willamette Writers Conference
Sunday, August 3
3:00-4:15

From Flabby To Firm: Toning Your  Poetry For Power And Precision

Revision is not a four-letter word! In this interactive workshop Sage Cohen will offer a high-level review of revision strategies that can be employed to make a good poem great. We will consider a few sample poems in detail to practice identifying strengths and opportunities for improvement. Students should each bring a poem of their own, which they will practice revising together through a series of exercises.
Level: Beginning/Intermediate
Format: Presentation, Exercises, Q & A
Bring: A Poem of your own

 

 

July 16: B&N features Katharine Salzmann, Willa Schneberg and Matt Schumacher

Barnes & Noble Reading Series is delighted to present poets Katharine Salzmann, Willa Schneberg and Matt Schumacher.

When: Wednesday, July 16, 7:00 p.m.

Where:
Barnes & Noble
1317 Lloyd Center // Gift section
Portland, OR 97232
503-249-0800

Hosted by: Sage Cohen

Katharine Salzmann's first chapbook of poetry Hemopoiesis was published by persian pony press in 1995. The Oregonian says of her work, "Human limitation and the apparent schism between mind and matter are absent here . . . Sensual, sensuous, refusing the either-or categories of Western rationality, this is a poet who apprehends the world in its wholeness, its gift, and gives it back in kind."  Her most recent chapbook of poetry Prayer Ceremony was published by persian pony press in 2007. She lives with her daughter and works as a massage therapist in Portland.

Willa Schneberg received the Oregon Book Award In Poetry for her second collection In The Margins of The World. A poem was published in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2006: Nineteenth Annual Collection, St. Martin's Press. Her third collection of poetry, Storytelling In Cambodia, was published by Calyx Books, (2006). Poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, Rosebud and Exquisite Corpse.  She has presented her work at the Library of Congress, Wordstock, and will be a guest poet at the Montana Festival of the Book later this year.

Matt Schumacher lives in Eastern Oregon, where the natives revere the flavorful huckleberry. His first collection of poetry, Spilling the Moon, made its debut in March 2008, and his poems have recently appeared/will soon appear in ZYZZYVA, Green Mountains Review, and Portland Review. A second project, Fire Diary, has chapbook-sized and full-length versions in the works, both of which feature dastardly but very charismatic pyromaniac impulses.

Depth of Field

In preparation for the rapid approach of our son, Jon and I purchased a new camera with all the bells and whistles. Because technology is my friend only after a proper introduction has been made by someone else who knows what they're doing, Jon has become master of the camera; as he learns, he teaches me.

Today I've been admiring Jon's experiments with depth of field (these photos are his) and considering how it mirrors the changes in my life.

The more closely we look at a certain thing, the more blurry everything beyond the subject becomes. This seems to be what pregnancy is demanding of me: a singular focus, a deliberate tunnel vision, a simplicity. After keeping so many balls in the air for so long, I am suddenly utterly incapable of the juggle.

My depth of field has narrowed to the life inside of me, this enormous and weary body that carries it and the needs of my family. Everything beyond that nucleus has gone soft and blurry. As my priorities shift like sand in the great wind of this transition to motherhood, I am told that even my beloved animals will lose focus a bit as our son takes center stage. That is difficult to imagine. I will hold these photos as stones along the path--reminders that we choose in every moment how to adjust the lens.