Toni Partington and Christopher Luna on KBOO's Talking Earth Monday, December 20/ Verse in Person Open Reading with Doug Spangle December 22

TONI PARTINGTON AND CHRISTOPHER LUNA

Talking Earth

Monday Night

December 20, 10-11 PM Pacific Time

KBOO Radio, 90.7 FM

Portland, OR

Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and David Madgalene

at the celebration for the release of their collaborative art book and poem

To Be Named and Other Works of Poetic License

(http://tobenamed-artandpoetry.blogspot.com/)

Angst Gallery, Vancouver, WA

July 2010 

It Matters to Notice These Things

two enormous crows
mate in the sycamore out front
silently
shiny black wings extended

it’s one o’clock
on a Tuesday
warmest day since winter thaw
first day without socks

I want to be the crow
eat worms and
gum wrappers and
mate without privacy
on the front lawn

before I can back into the street
they’ve finished
lean together on the branch
first spring foliage
provides little seclusion
they could care less about these things

just off the curb
I sit stare
watch to see if intimacy exists
between them
between crows

humans are love scavengers
crows of emotion
we skim the surface
peck our way through the top layer of romance
unable to mine riches of the heart
with tools dulled by hurt
and a hard outer shell

I think about intimacy a lot these days
too much
I notice when couples don’t touch
wonder how love can possibly endure in this world

the biggest crow hops a branch
slow glide to center yard
caw, caws

stares me down

I want to be the crow
let him have my life
pay bills and
feel the weight of all this nonsense

imagine me
cawing in the neighborhood
shiny black wings extended
under afternoon sun.

Toni Partington, Wind Wing
2010

Toni Partington reads from Wind Wing

at Paper Tiger Coffee in Vancouver, WA

Photo by Anni Becker

Message from Barbara La Morticella, host of KBOO'sTalking Earth:
Toni Partington and Christopher Luna are at the center of a active and supportive literary scene in Vancouver, Washington. Life partners, they thrive off of each other’s creative energy, run a small press service together, and host a monthly reading and open reading series at Cover to Cover Books.

Toni is a poet, editor, visual artist, and life/career coach in Vancouver. Her poetry has been published in the The Cascade Journal, VoiceCatcher (editions 3 and 4), OutwardLink.net, Perceptions, and others. She is the author of two books of poetry, Jesus Is A Gas (2009), and Wind Wing (2010). She serves as Co-Editor forVoiceCatcher, an annual Pacific Northwest anthology of women writers. She is co-founder, with Christopher Luna, of Printed Matter Vancouver, an editing and small press service.

Christopher Luna reads his poetry

at Paper Tiger Coffee in Vancouver, WA

Photo by Anni Becker

Christopher Luna is a poet, visual artist, and the editor of “The Work,” a monthly email newsletter featuring poetry events in Portland and Vancouver (http://christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com). He is also a columnist for Sage Cohen’s Writing the Life Poetic E-Zine (http://www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com). His books include tributes and ruminations (Dristil Press, 2000), On the Beam (with David Madgalene, 2005), Sketches for a Paranoid Picture Book on Memory (King of Mice Press, 2005), and GHOST TOWN, USA (This is Not an Albatross, 2008). His latest volume, To Be Named and Other Works of Poetic License, is a poetic travelogue and art book created in collaboration with David Madgalene and Toni Partington(http://www.tobenamed-artandpoetry.blogspot.com). In early 2011 Big Bridge will publish the selected correspondence of Stan Brakhage and the poet Michael McClure, an important piece of Twentieth-Century art history that Christopher Luna edited at Brakhage’s request.

pavement pastoral

there is a determined melancholy
to the suicide dive of
autumn leaves
as they tear themselves
from the limbs of trembling trees
to spiral earthward like eels
caught in zoetrope flicker

Christopher Luna
November 1, 2010

Open Reading at Verse in Person

Wednesday night

December 22

6:30 to 8 PM

Verse in Person

Northwest Branch of the Multnomah County Library

2300 NW Thurman (corner of 23 & Thurman) Portland OR

Come early to sign up!

Take a break from the Christmas bustle to socialize with others who have other things on their mind on December 22 than spending money-- namely, sharing gifts of the spirit with a community of like-minded people. Whether you’re a novice or have volumes to your credit, come and let host Doug Spangle introduce you to the Northwest Library Community. Reading starts at 6:30; some and sign up any time after 6 to be sure to read. Bring a selection of poems; we’ll see how many we can get through.

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.