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Poetry Month Happenings

In lieu of a poetry book for today’s blogpost (I am reading a “Selected” and didn’t get through it — skipping long story about why), here are two links to today’s events.

One is my poem, “It Is Made of Broken Parts,” posted this morning at One Art.

 

The other is the amazing Rexville Grange Art Show, running until April 16th, and, today from 1:30-2:30, hosting my writing group reading poetry and prose. Click on this link to go to their website:

https://rexvillegrangeartshow.com.

And a head’s up: next week, I’ll be reading alongside two other poets at Edmonds Book Shop, Thursday, April 20, 6:30-7:30. For information, click on this link (or visit Rose Alley Press): https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org/event/third-thursday-art-walk-poetry-night-2023.

David D. Horowitz

David D. Horowitz, as most Seattle poets know, is Rose Alley Press, which began in 1995, championing poetry in general, meter and rhyme wherever possible, and Northwest poets specifically. Among the many, Rose Alley has published Michael Spence, Joanne Kervran Stangeland, Donald Kentop, and one of my professors from UW days, William Dunlop. David is also responsible — barring a pandemic — for poetry readings in coffee houses and libraries all over the region to celebrate Rose Alley’s anthologies (most recently, Footbridge Above the Falls: Poems by Forty-eight Northwest Poets).

In her cover praise for David’s newest book, Slow Clouds over Rush Hour, Carolyne Wright calls the poet a  “Moralist and wit, latter-day Catullus or perhaps the Blake of Songs of Experience transposed to the 21st century.” But even though many of the poems refer to days and poets gone by, I can’t help feeling they are always a chronicle of our post-modern life, reporting on the political stew, a mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s, “the rat race” (and cats, too). As Wright points out, Slow Clouds also captures moments of “quiet enjoyment, when the speaker, a human cog in the corporate machine of his day job, puts aside the allures of overachievement and savors, at evening, ‘this scarlet rose, / Vase, lamplit valley view.'”

I’m compelled to share at least one couplet from Slow Clouds over Rush Hour:

How to Be an Editor

Learn how to use a period and comma
And how to spell “baboon” and “llama.”

And here’s one of those “quiet enjoyment” poems from the last pages:

Glow and Glitter

Gray sunlight whitens undecided sky — and peeks
Through clouds, which start to dissipate. Gold streaks
Help thaw restraint. Another sunny day despite
More news of shooting, theft, and feuding fight.
Where threats and violence might seem the norm,
A simple sunray might enliven, warm,
And calm. So, beauty trickles through a break
And giggles glitter on the city lake
And shimmers, simmers silver surface, streaks
It gold. Through haze, I think I see the peaks.

— David D. Horowitz

 

On April 10 — 1:30-5 p.m. — there will be an actual book-signing, with real live people and everything (with all precautions) at BookTree in Kirkland. In corresponding with David, I also learned that he will be doing a Zoom reading for Edmonds Bookshop on Thursday, April 22, 6 p.m., along with Carolyne Wright, Jim Bertolino, Anita K. Boyle, and Douglas Schuder. (The best place to find the Zoom link for Edmonds is on their Facebook page or at the website, https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org.) Follow this link to learn how to purchase Slow Clouds over Rush Hour as well as other Rose Alley Press titles.

Donald Kentop

ON PAPER WINGS, Donald Kentop. Rose Alley Press, 4204 Brooklyn Ave. NW, Seattle, WA 98015-5911, 2004, 44 pages, $6.95 paper, https://www.rosealleypress.com/.

Donald Kentop loves traditional forms, sonnets and villanelles, rhyme and meter. Though he occasionally breaks into free verse, reading this entire, short book was a delight to the ear.

For a story about more recent work, see this article in The Seattle Timeshttps://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/poet-reminds-us-of-price-profit-can-exact/.

But there is something timeless about a poem such as this:

The Winter Cherry

As I grew up, impatient for the spring,
I noticed that a fruitless cherry tree
would bloom behind my house in wintertime
and, counter to the season, blossoms burst
along the branches even through the snow.
Erupting wide as it was tall, the pink
anomaly would always startle me
like mushrooms in a morning lawn. The soft
rebellion had defied the solstice once
again, compressing months into days
in my mind. The prunus autumnalis
blooms again this year. How many more,
who knows? Except that trees have lifetimes too,
like men, and this one I am sure is old.
I no longer see the tree a joke
on nature, rather nature’s joke on me.
A wonder still, each petal when and where
it ought to be. Now I welcome winter
because the springtime comes too soon for me,
and I have gone to counting–having found
it easier to tally winter nights
than to subtract from sunny summer days.

 

Where You’ll Find Me

I have several upcoming gigs to tell you about.

The first is TONIGHT at Zippy’s — where I’ll be reading with a few other contributors to the Northwest poets anthology Footbridge Above the Falls: Poems by Forty-Eight Northwest Poets, edited by David D. Horowitz. Click on the Rose Alley Press website to see their other offerings in the coming months.

Everett Poetry Night
Thursday, November 7, 2019, 6:30 p.m.

Poetry: Robinson Bolkum, Kevin Craft, Christopher J. Jarmick, Jed Myers, Bethany Reid, David D. Horowitz, and open mic
Cafe Zippy, 1502 Rucker Avenue, Everett, WA
Telephone: 425-303-0474
E-mail: CafeZippyInfo@gmail.com; David, rosealleypress@juno.com
URL: www.cafezippy.com/; www.rosealleypress.com

then —

Event Date: Friday, November 22, 2019 – 7:00pm
Event Location: Raymond Carver Room | Port Angeles Public Library, 2210 S. Peabody St.
Again, just click on the link to see full information.
…and then —

So,Dear Writer…: An It’s About Time Writers’ Reading Series Anthology — Elliott Bay Books, Seattle

Sunday, November 24, 3 p.m.

I’ll be one of several readers, including Peggy Sturdivant, and the anthology publisher.

I’ll be reading my “famous” craft essay, “One Bad Poem,” and of course I would love to see you there.