Poetry Zooming Today: Gary Copeland Lilley and Jourdan Imani Keith

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Jourdan Imani Keith

Yesterday’s email brought this announcement from Kate Reavey:

Peninsula College invites you to participate in the next offering of Conversations Toward a Culture of Justice on August 6, from 4:00 – 6:00 pm, via Zoom.

Peninsula College’s summer conversation series was inspired by Nitasha Lewis, Upward Bound Manager and Peninsula College student, who worked with Dr. Helen Lovejoy and Dr. Kate Reavey to create this safe space for dialogue and discussion. The co-facilitators see this as a valuable educational framework we can offer to students and to the larger communities we serve.  

This spring The Peninsula College Board of Trustees adopted a resolution, urging the college community to take “actions that seek to dismantle systemic inequality and bias [and] confront hate and violence.’ These conversations are a step toward this important and necessary work.
We are delighted to welcome poets Gary Copeland Lilley and Jourdan Imani Keith, who will begin with a poetry reading. 
 
The City of Seattle’s 2019 -2021 Civic Poet, Jourdan Imani Keith is a storyteller, essayist, playwright, naturalist and activist. She is the author of the anthem Let Seattle Be and a student of Sonia Sanchez. Her TEDx Talk, “Your Body of Water,” the theme for King County’s 2016-2018 Poetry on Buses program won an Americans for the Arts award. Her poetry is largely anthologized and was long listed by Danez Smith for Cosmonauts Avenue poetry prize. Keith’s Orion Magazine essays, “Desegregating Wilderness” and “At Risk” were selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology (Houghton Mifflin). She has been awarded fellowships from Hedgebrook, Wildbranch, Santa Fe Science Writing workshop, VONA, and Jack Straw. Her memoir in essays, Tugging at the Web is forthcoming from University of Washington Press. She is the founder and director of Urban Wilderness Project.
 
Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman’s Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing, from Blue Horse Press (2018). He is originally from North Carolina and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry 2014, Willow Springs, The Swamp, Waxwing, the Taos International Journal of Poetry, and the African American Review. He is a Cave Canem fellow. 
 
This series is co-sponsored by Studium Generale, Magic of Cinema, PC Forks, the Peninsula College English Department, PC Library/Media Center, and  ʔaʔk̓ʷustəƞáwt̓xʷ House of Learning, PC Longhouse. We are grateful for generous contributions to the Peninsula College Foundation.
 
For more information, contact Dr. Helen Lovejoy, hlovejoy@pencol.edu
 
Kate wrote: Please invite and encourage anyone who would like to attend the reading to do so. Everyone is invited!
Here is the Zoom link to share:  https://zoom.us/j/99105600039

will offer a poetry reading tomorrow afternoon (8.6.20) followed by a conversation and dialogue with the audience/participants. If you have time, please consider joining us. This is FREE and open to the public, so please feel free to share widely.


I plan to attend; it would great to see you there.

Claudia Castro Luna

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Among my busy calendar of Poetry Zoom events this week, I was able to attend Tracing the Maps, a poetry reading hosted by Seattle’s Hugo House, featuring Carolyne Wright, Claudia Castro Luna, Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, and Raúl Sánchez. (It is not available as a recording, but it should be.)

I had heard three of the poets in person, over the years, but I am ashamed to admit that I had never heard our Washington Poet Laureate, Claudia Castro Luna, read her work. And I was, frankly, blown away. The woman has such presence and poise, and remarkable, memorable poems full of striking and eye-opening images.

I recently bought a copy of her 2016 chapbook from Floating Bridge Press: this city, a collection of 19 prose poems and an introduction, “Invitation.” If you aren’t yet familiar with her work, here’s a sample to introduce you:

Aerial Equivalent

Each night evening lights, like birthday cake candles, draw out their
last breath. Curtains close over windows in hill homes and in seedy
motel rooms where families too live week to week. From thousands of
hushed, slumbering bodies the unspoken loosens up, levitates. Wishes,
anxieties, and aversions reach the heavens. They fly over the east, over
the west, by way of the north, circling hills and downtown. A formless
psychic soup occupies the aerial equivalent of the city below. Slowly an
invisible city coalesces, imperfect but peaceful, unlike its terrestrial
twin. By daybreak the buoyant city crumbles. Its detritus unadorned
and lodged in unsuspecting throats.

–Claudia Castro-Luna, from this city (Floating Bridge Press, 2016)

You can read more about Claudia at her website, https://www.castroluna.com/ (see link above) or at poets.org.

On Poetry

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I lifted this from a friend’s blog, The Poetry Department…aka The Boynton Blog  For some reason, I especially needed to hear it today. Funny how the universe can respond.

 

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems/
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”
Wisława Szymborska
(July 2, 1923 – February 1, 2012)

. . . . .
photo: Piotr Guzik
quote from “Possibilities”

 

 

In Troubled Times

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I can thank Robert Reich for introducing me to this poet, Clint Smith. I’m just beginning to explore his work, but in this poem, he reminds me of Naomi Shihab Nye in the way he looks at both sides of a controversy and asks us to rise to a new level of empathy, to reconsider the way we think about other people’s catastrophes. He challenges me to think differently about reading the news.

Meanwhile, 20 of my Emily Dickinson poems have found a home at Ravenna Press of Edmonds, Washington, and I’m pleased as punch about this delightful little book, which combines my poems with those of Port Townsend poet Jayne Marek, and images from artist George J. Farrah.

I keep thinking, these days, of Neil Gaiman‘s admonition — in difficult times, he tells us — “make good art.”