Sheila Bender interviews

This morning Ed Harkness sent me a link to this interview series with the wonderful Sheila Bender.

https://kptz.org/podcasts/in-conversation/

I am frantically preparing to attend PNWA this week, but wanted to share this resource with you.

I hope you write!

 

Bethany

Edward Harkness: The Law of the Unforeseen

Our reading at Elliott Bay Books is only one week away! Here’s a poem from Ed’s newest book. I’ve discovered that you can find him all over the web, including Verse Daily and Terrain.

 

One of the things (or two) that I love about Ed’s poems is their range. He strikes me as a thoroughly Pacific Northwest poet, and yet he weaves in  his international rovings, musings about historical and fictional characters, and observations of natural phenomenon from all over the globe, and he does so in such a way that I feel as though I am there, too.

Here is a short poem that gives me that sense of a wholly unfamiliar place (to me), now made knowable.

 

Ed Harkness

 

ICEBERGS NEAR TWILLINGATE

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, en route
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

 

from The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2018)

Where You’ll Find Me

On Friday, August 16, at 7 p.m.,
I will be reading from Body My House at Elliott Bay Book Company.
I’m thrilled (of course) and very very grateful to poet Ed Harkness and Elliott Bay Books for inviting me.

Wouldn’t it be lovely
if about 50 of my nearest and dearest friends could join us?

(Yes, it would!)

Bethany

 

The Poet in Paris

Yes, that would be me — on my way to France for the very first time, using my very-seldom-used passport and packing my poems and leaving tomorrow morning! I’m traveling with my friend, poet and photographer Francine E. Walls (whose poem you may remember from a few weeks ago), and we’ll begin with a week in Chartres, for a workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. Then it’s on to Paris, and what Francine promises to be a fabulous introduction to the City of Light.

My daughters dared me to zip-line off the Eiffel Tower, and although they were responsible for my kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland, some dares you just don’t have to take.

Anywho, this is just a quick post to let you know I now have a better excuse for not being caught up with the blog. Over the next two weeks, you can follow me on Instagram to see daily highlights.

Here’s a poem in the meantime:

Mirabeau Bridge

Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
          And lovers
    Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
We’re face to face and hand in hand
         While under the bridges
    Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
Love elapses like the river
         Love goes by
    Poor life is indolent
And expectation always violent
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
The days and equally the weeks elapse
         The past remains the past
    Love remains lost
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
         The night is a clock chiming
         The days go by not I
Guillaume Apollinaire. “Mirabeau Bridge” from Alcools, English translation copyright 1995 Donald Revell and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Alcools (Wesleyan University Press, 1995)