Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic at Cover to Cover Books Featuring John Sibley Williams February 9

 

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC

Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

all ages and uncensored since 2004

7pm Thursday, February 9, 2012

and every second Thursday

Cover to Cover Books

6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B

(St. James & Minnehaha)

Vancouver, WA

360-993-7777

mail@covertocoverbooks.net

christopherjluna@gmail.com

http://www.printedmattervancouver.com

http://christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com

With our featured reader, John Sibley Williams:

John Sibley Williams is the author of six chapbooks, winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the Pushcart and Rumi Poetry Prizes. He has served as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and Publicist for Three Muses Press 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. The following chapbooks will be available for sale on February 9: From Colder Climates (2012, $7 for the green and $10 for the signature edition); The Longest Compass (Finishing Line Press, 2012 for $12); and The Chapbook Box Set (four 2011 chapbooks for $15: Autobiography of Fever, Bedouin Books; The Art of Raining, Knives Forks and Spoons Press; Door, Door, Red Ochre Press; and A Pure River, The Last Automat Press).

  

The Voice in the Shell

by John Sibley Williams

If it really began with a woman

ten thousand years ago placing

conch to ear—

            listening interrupted

            and enhanced

            by translation—

to form this sea

separating us,

I’d build a time machine

and retrace the roots of metaphor—

            language, superstition,

            expectation—

to that older world without magic

and sit for a moment

holding your hand

that is not yet a hand,

listening together to the sea

that hasn’t yet a voice.

 Sketch of John Sibley Williams by Christopher Luna

COMING IN MARCH: John Burgess

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC welcomes Peter Ludwin Thursday, November 10

 

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC

HOSTED BY CHRISTOPHER LUNA

AND TONI PARTINGTON

Presented by Printed Matter Vancouver

http://printedmattervancouver.com

at COVER TO COVER BOOKS

7pm Thursday, November 10, 2011

and every second Thursday

COVER TO COVER BOOKS

6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B

(St. James & Minnehaha)

Vancouver, WA

360-993-7777

mail@covertocoverbooks.net

 christopherjluna@gmail.com

With our featured reader, Peter Ludwin:

Peter Ludwin is the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust.  He was the Second Prize Winner of the 2007-2008 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards, and a Finalist for the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award.  For the past ten years he has been a participant in the San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he has workshopped under such noted poets as Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland and David St. John.  His work has appeared in many journals, including The Bitter Oleander, The Com-stock Review, North American Review and Prairie Schooner, to name a few.  His first full length collection, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker Press. A chapbook, The Door Unhinged, was a semi-finalist for both the 2010 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award and the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. His second full-length manuscript, Rumors of Fallible Gods, was a Finalist for the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award.  His poem “Terezin Concentration Camp, Bohemia,” was nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize.  An avid traveler who has journeyed on the rivers of the Amazon Basin in Ecuador by canoe to visit remote Indian families, hiked in the Peruvian Andes, thumbed for rides in Greece and bargained for goods in the markets of Marrakech and Istanbul, he recently returned from a month in Western China and Tibet.          

Tagong: the Wild West

by Peter Ludwin

A pack of dogs roams the muddy street

that bisects this one-horse Tibetan town,

and a dead one stains the sidewalk with its corpse.

Rough-looking Khampas gather by their motorbikes.

In the clinic, a young Chinese doctor

gives me a three-hour IV and a shot to bring

my fever down.  Obama! he says.  Kobe!

On the mountainside, prayer flags thick as stars.  

Notes from a Sodbuster’s Wife, Kansas, 1868

by Peter Ludwin

What really got us in the end—

we women who didn’t make it,

who withered and blew away in the open—

was the wind.  Space, yes, and distance,

too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,

vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,

boils up off the horizon to suck dry

their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.

Not convinced?  Scan the photographs,

grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.

Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,

our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,

accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried.  Lord knows I tried.

Survived the locusts and even snakes

that fell from the ceiling at night,

slithering between us in bed.

I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell

of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.

I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.

Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind.  Even as it scoured

the skin it flayed the soul,

that raked, pitted shell.

And how like the Cheyenne,

appearing, disappearing,

no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

Dennis McBride praises Ghost Town Poetry

Those who attend poetry readings in Vancouver, WA are aware of Dennis McBride's sardonic wit, high speed verbal pyrotechnics, and amazing facility with the language. The community has completely embraced both Dennis and his stalwart traveling companion, Mike G, neither of whom misses an opportunity to share their work with the folks at Cover to Cover and Paper Tiger. 

Dennis recently read the following statement about Ghost Town Poetry (available through http://covertocoverbooks.net or http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Town-Poetry-2004-2010-Anthology/dp/1461075114/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312469042&sr=1-1), the anthology of poems from the long-running Ghost Town Poetry open mic edited by myself and Toni Partington. I reprint his comments here with his permisssion. I am very grateful to Dennis for all that he contributed to the scene, and for his kind words of encouragement:

Dennis McBride 

Photo by Elizabeth Archers

Butch Cassidy and Sundance ride into Ghost Town

Hats off to Chris and Toni. Ghost Town is such a genuinely remarkable carousel of what poetry can do that if it were sent out on another Voyager mission and discovered by extraterrestrials it would allow them to know what being a human being on the earth was like. There are so many good, well-crafted poems in this anthology that each one calls out for attention because, as Stafford said, "poetry is about a certain kind of attention," which Ghost Town delivers. 

I selected and focus on Kyle David Congdon and Alex Birkett only because I'm interested in the voice as it relates to personality, or the voice behind the voice in their poems.

I'm not really stalking them. I'm not gay--really a closet heterosexual--and that's more information than you wanted I'm sure.

But I'm also focusing on their poems because, by way of example, I think they shed light on the other work in this volume and poetry in general.

Congdon's "So...But...Sleep" and Birkett's "Avoiding the Light" and "Styx" illustrate what the best poetry should do, which is to successfully seduce the intellect's heart (a function generally denied to science) and hijack the intelligent head, stop it in its tracks, hold it hostage for ransom from the heart's mysterious negotiable currency. Another measure of these poems' power is that they pull you in but do not release you; something occult and transcendent pulls you back, which is partly that the poem's voice is trustworthy and solid, scattering breadcrumbs that will lead out of the forest and into Thomas Wolfe's "lost lane into heaven," but it's also the under-appreciated unexpected presence of surprise that is really the life blood of poetry and which is interstitially woven into the fabric of these poems. There are instances in the poems where meaning is elusive but it's the fact that one is not bothered by that which sends a signal that one is in the neighborhood of the sublime, and in these poems it is the continual reappearance of the unexpected that sends that signal; you are taken somewhere which bypasses the brain's stifling seat of reason, and yet are given unforgettable lines like Kyle's "I know forever about the unfinished endless visious" followed shortly by "you need to breathe, Butterfly," which sums up the totality, setting out travail and treatment better than a PhD thesis or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, and there is the vastness of the intelligence in Birkett's "Avoiding the Light," which rescues humanity from its isolating, isolated morass of smothering morality  by celebrating our pleasure principle, not "east of Eden" but somewhere left of "whoopi." And then to turn around in "Styx" and in a few short lines juggle the see saw transition from tenderness to the heart's rage left me wanting more. Even porn can't do that. I just wanted to stay in the Ghost Town poems and go back and forth like a child in a swing.      

Dennis McBride

2011

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic with special guest Tommy Gaffney Thursday, July 14

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC

HOSTED BY CHRISTOPHER LUNA

AND TONI PARTINGTON

at COVER TO COVER BOOKS

7pm Thursday, July 14

and every second Thursday

COVER TO COVER BOOKS

6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B

(St. James & Minnehaha)

Vancouver, WA

360-993-7777

mail@covertocoverbooks.net

christopherjluna@gmail.com

all ages & uncensored since 2004

With our featured reader, Tommy Gaffney:



Tommy Gaffney

Photo by John Hogl



Tommy Gaffney was born and raised in Kentucky, somewhere between the projects and the trailer parks. He is the author of two collections of poetry and prose, Whiskey Days (2010) and Three Beers from Oblivion (2006). His work has appeared in such anthologies as The Night Bomb Review, The Drunk Poets Society Anthology; Volume 2 and The Broken Word Anthology; Volumes 1 & 2. He has performed at the Insomniacathon, Wordstock, Columbia Gorge Community College, KBOO radio, and hosted the annual Artists Night Out Spoken Word Festival at Artists Repertory Theater. In 2010, Tommy was nominated for the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Gaffney's favorite colors are John Deere Green and Joey Ramone Black. Nowadays, you can often find him wandering the streets of Portland, Oregon.

Banshee Time

by Tommy Gaffney

Head for cover right around banshee time.

Dusk comes about like a fattened bottom lip,
pouting.
The willows pull in their ears
while lightning bugs hunt down
little kids to taunt.
Sonnets crawl into the dog-houses out back,
boarding spiders and prey
now that the half-breeds are dead.
It’s hard to feel brave in open fields,
no corner to back yourself into.
If genes were balls,
maybe I’d be tougher by now
instead of scared of the dark.
Harrods Creek pulls down its blinds.
The county locks away the mowers for the night
while bluegrass winks at cartographers.
Crickets clear their throat
and banshees tip-toe the starting line.

French Poetry with Naomi Fast at Niche Wine and Art Bar Saturday, May 28 at 6pm

Poet Naomi Fast

6pm

Saturday, May 28

Niche Wine and Art Bar

1013 Main Street, Vancouver

http://lekkerentertainment.blogspot.com/

Niche poet laureate Christopher Luna invites you to join us for an evening of poetry by Congolese poet Olivier Sangi Lutondo, as translated (from French into English) by Naomi Fast.

Naomi Fast holds Master of Arts degrees in Creative Writing (2005) & Theater Arts (2006) from Portland State University. She has won several awards for her writing, including The Academy of American Poets Prize and The Shelley Reece Award. Her poem "Kajiji Fires" was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize. Naomi works as an adjunct professor at Portland State University and is on the editorial collective for VoiceCatcher, a Portland literary anthology. Most recently, she has published poetry in Ghost Town Poetry, edited by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington. Her website is http://www.wordstothewind.com.

One of Naomi's longer term projects is the translation of a book of poems and prose by Congolese poet, Olivier Sangi Lutondo. Naomi lived in Kajiji, Zaire in the 1980's, and her Congolese tata (aka dad), Pakisa Tshimika, founder of Mama Makeka House of Hope (http://www.mmhhope.org) and Lutondo's cousin, gave her a book of Lutondo's poems to translate from French to English.  The poems you'll be hearing are from this book, La Deliverance Au Paradis-Bar. 

Lutondo, "poète cokwe," (or Tshokwe, an ethnicity inhabiting parts of Angola, Namibia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia) is the "poet of peace" in the land of his birth, where peace is an ever elusive presence. This book introduces us to a truly special and unique people through the voice of their honored poet; we learn of some of their circumstances, hopes and fears, but most of all, we discover the music, poetry and beauty of their spirit.

In the preface of La Deliverance Au Paradis-Bar (New Legend press, 2002), Metena M.Simon-Pierre writes, "It’s this concern for the human condition and the unfulfilled desire for humanity to return to its beauty and original integrity that convinced me to preface this book. Indeed, this desire and quest to be a "better-humanity" come through, like a watermark, the poems and other essays collected in this volume. They echo - at times in rebellion, other times imploringly - the cries of distress, uncertainty, and stubborn hope that constantly disappoints his people... but also of the nobility of a people who know they are called to testify of their courage in this world of infernal machines."

In a letter to Fast, Olivier wrote that what made him a poet is the way poetry allows him to to eternally document, through art, the lives of his people. Her hope, as a poet and a child of Olivier's country, is to help his words be heard by many more people, in another land not really so far away.