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.

Market Day Poetry Series Tomorrow, June 19: Poets Peter Ludwin, Eileen Elliott, and Gail Moore at St. Johns Booksellers

Market Day Poetry Series

Curated by Dan Raphael

Every Saturday from June through September

a block from the St. Johns farmer’s market

Saturday, June 19

12 – 1 pm

Poets Peter Ludwin, Eileen Elliott, and Gail Moore

Hosted by Christopher Luna

St. Johns Booksellers

8622 N. Lombard Street

Portland, OR

Bios and poems

Peter Ludwin will be reading from his first full length poetry collection, A Guest in All Your Houses (Word Walker Press 2009, $14). A review of the book is available here: http://www.lochravenreview.net/2010Spring/doss.html

For the past nine years he has been a participant in the San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he has workshopped under renowned poets such as Mark Doty, Tony Barnstone, Forrest Gander, Linda Gregg, C.D. Wright, Patricia Goedicke, Alfred Corn and C.K. Williams, to name a few. In 2007 he received a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, an adjunct of the Washington State Arts Commission. He was the 2007-2008 Second Prize Winner of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards, and during the same year he was also a finalist for the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award. He is a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee.

His poems have appeared in many journals, among them Antietam Review, Briar Cliff Review, California Quarterly, Coal City Review, Common Ground Review, The Comstock Review, Concho River Review, Connecticut River Review, Cottonwood, Flint Hills Review, Front Range, The Fourth River, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Hurricane Review, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Karamu, Kyoto Journal, Lake Effect, Lullwater Review, Mad Poets Review, Midwest Quarterly, Peregrine, Permafrost, The Prague Revue, Quercus Review, Red Wheelbarrow, River Oak Review, The Rockford Review, Slant, Small Pond Magazine of Literature, The Raven Chronicles, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Whiskey Island Magazine and Writers Without Borders.

He currently has work forthcoming in Cider Press Review, RiverSedge, Tribeca Poetry Review, Willard & Maple and Wisconsin Review.

He has been a featured reader in Washington, Oregon, California, South Dakota, Minnesota and in the Czech Republic. In 1996 he read over the radio during the Cleveland Bi-Centennial. He has twice read for the Distinguished Writers Series in Tacoma, Washington. In the fall of 2009 he read for the John R. Milton Writer’s Conference at the University of South Dakota, and featured with noted poet and fiction writer Frank Gaspar at Whittier College in Los Angeles. He also has a background in folk music, and plays acoustic guitar and autoharp. He has both taught and performed at the Pacific Northwest Folklife Festival.

Forest Camp, Pahvant Range, Utah
by Peter Ludwin

From up here I could summon wolves
to circle my sleeping bag, I could
call down the moon on my tongue.

The sun on the red cliffs behind me,
the stream roaring through rabbitbrush
while cottonwoods dance in the wind—

these tell me, like the handwriting
that condemned Belshazzar, that I
have been judged and found wanting.

I must stay here, in mind if not in body.
I must cultivate the heart of a whisper,
of the artichoke buried in spines.

It’s late in the harvest season,
and I must gather enough of me up
to make it through the winter.

Eileen Davis Elliott was born to the Great Plains, polished by the winds of the world and continues to be fine-tuned by daily experience. She writes of seeking and sometimes finding, of sinning and sometimes redemption. Her book, Prodigal Cowgirl ($15), reflects journeys and partial resolutions.

Her second book Miles of Pies is well under way. She is a mixed media artist and continues to travel since her recent retirement as a psychologist.

Excerpt from Canis Lupus
by Eileen Elliott

We sing our choruses in yelping voices
cadences from long-gone times
now faded into whispers
made near-inaudible by passing years

And the cracking of long bones in our jaws is electric
like the borealis
on deep snow


Gail Moore was a voiceless poet most of her life. She finally began writing in 1990 after a vision of a strange animal emerging from a cave and shaking off wool. She lives in Newport, Oregon, and after a long love affair with the rain, misses the sun and wants to go home to LA.

Gail was the recipient of the Pacifica Foundation Award for Best Poet of 2001 and the Dorothy Daniels Honorary Writing Award competition in 2000. She is the author of two books: Poems on the Half Shell ($14) and Post Card Poems ($10).

Spillage
by Gail Moore

In the house of mistakes
I grafted your name into the future.
Your name was shadow. My name was dust.

Sibilant or still, I slid down the dry wall;
I joined you in the court of redress as
we had spilled our best over the edge of time.

Your face melted into an astonishing silence.
I find you only in sleep or in the leftover
parts of myself.

I have rattled the door of your mind
but you do not answer.
Still, your name sleeps on my floor.