Brittany Baldwin, Barbara Drake, and Barbara LaMorticella at St. Johns Booksellers Saturday, September 18/Joann Ferias and Cindy Williams Guitterez on KBOO's Talking Earth Monday, September 20

From Barbara LaMorticella barbala@teleport.com

Barbara LaMorticella

September 18, Noon, St Johns Booksellers 8622 N Lombard, Portland

Barbara Drake, Brittany Baldwin, and Barbara LaMorticella
read on Market Day

Barbara Drake, Brittany Baldwin and Barbara LaMorticella team up for an end of summer reading. Enjoy an afternoon of organic produce at the St. John’s Farmer’s Market, and books and spoken word at the St. Johns Booksellers from Noon to 1 o’clock.

One of Oregon’s most beloved poets, Barbara Drake raises sheep, grapes and grandchildren on her small farm in Yamhill. Barbara is winner of many awards for both poetry and prose, and her memoir Peace at Heart was an Oregon Book Award finalist. Her college textbook, Writing Poetry, has been in print and continuously used in colleges across the country since 1983. Barbara's work is both grounded and ever-changing.

Brittany Baldwin

Brittany Baldwin combines fabulous cookery with extraordinary poetry and writing. She has cooked and catered professionally for almost 20 years. She currently owns and runs a personal chef catering company, and grows many of her own vegetables and herbs herself organically on her small homestead. Her first collection was Broken Knuckles Against Knives Cutting The Food to Feed Me Through This. She’s won awards for both cooking and poetry.

Barbara LaMorticella has co-hosted Talking Earth on KBOO since 1988. Her second collection of poems, Rain on Waterless Mountain, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She’s won a Stewart H. Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contribution to Oregon Literary Arts, a Bumbershoot Big Book Award, and in 2010 the first Northwest Poets Concord Prize. Her newest collection is “The Great Dance,” poems 1969 to the present. She lives in the woods outside Portland.

THE SENSITIVE
by Barbara Drake

The truly sensitive are better than you and I, their ears flap shut at the slightest unpleasantness. To soften their passage, sleeping mice curl in the toes of their slippers. Their tongues are coated with microscopic light-emitting diodes and when they open their mouths an ethereal glow comes forth like that of a firefly caught in an old mayonnaise jar. When they move the world doesn’t jangle or slap like seawater in a rocky hollow the way it does with the rest of us, but slides past with a gentle shussing. We cannot imagine anyone having given birth to them, for their heads seem too fragile to have ever been squeezed into existence in this rough animal fashion.

EXCERPT FROM "AND THEY DO, AND IT DOES"
by Brittany Baldwin

Refusing to settle for the expectations of my form
I run my hands over butter
and smudge it across the bottom of a hot pan
with my fingers lightly.
I close my eyes instead of looking for you,
I close my eyes and think of all the men
I’ve tried to explain this to,
but before I have a chance
they’ve already decided I must be gay,
I must’ve been beaten,
I’m way too damaged to be here on the other side
of things
mixing fire and metal on food.
Scared of the work in your hands,
settling against doors of misunderstandings
trying to create love,
trying to form love into a shape in my hands,
when there is only work
I am only working food through my skin.
They cannot see the rhythm,
they cannot see the processes,
they only see me with my eyes closed
in a cloud of stress and time...

Talking Earth Monday Night September 20

10-11 PM Pacific Time

KBOO, 90.7 FM Portland

Hispanic Heritage Month: Joann Ferias and Cindy Williams Guitterez bring poetry and music in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month to Talking Earth on Monday September 20. To open the Miracle Theater’s 2nd-annual festival of Hispanic Arts and Culture, Guitterez has teamed up with writer-storyteller Lynn Darroch and musician Gerardo Calderon to stage Dreaming the Americas: Encounters/Encuentros. Encuentros is a journey through the Americas from south of the border through the Northwest, narrated through the dreams of spoken word artists, and accompanied by the rhythms of Latin guitar and cello and the haunting sounds of pre-Hispanic instruments and Didgerido. Cindy and Gerardo preview and talk about the show, the theater, and the celebration.

Los Portenos is a lively group of Hispanic poets that has crystallized around the Teatro Milagro. Joann Ferias brings some of Los Portenos to share the air with Guitterez and Calderon.

THE BOY IN THE BALLOON
by Barbara LaMorticella

For Falcon Heene, who vomited at a press conference when asked
to vouch for his father’s lie that Falcon had accidentally cut loose his father’s
home-made balloon and then hid. The whole thing was actually his father’s
elaborate publicity stunt. Millions watched the untethered balloon fly

Watching as the balloon raced,
we grew so much bigger than ourselves.
our hearts came out of the basement.

We, too, were caught in an updraft,
spiralling unmoored, untethered from earth.

We floated with the six year old,
tossed and buffeted,
our world out of control,
not knowing where we would end
what field we would find ourselves in
when we came down.

Only when the balloon crashed
did we realize the ride we’d really taken
had never left the earth.
The wizard was only a con man.

The single grace note in the story was
the vomiting of a boy
who wouldn’t lie.

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.

Congratulations to Alex and Kori for a great reading

Many congratulations to Alex Birkett and Kori Sayer for their fantastic reading at St. Johns Booksellers last night. It was so nice to have the opportunity to hear a singificant amount of work from these two, who are among the most exciting of the regular readers at the Cover to Cover open mic. Here is a sketch I made of Alex that includes some of what we heard: