Poetry Reading, March 2, 6-7 p.m., Hibulb Cultural Center

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hibulb-cultural-center-iconhcc-mar2017-poetry-kcraft-breid-1

I would love to get this flyer to just show up in the full here, but I’m wrestling with my limited technological abilities, so I’m not sure it will. Click on the link, if not.

Technology — both a curse and a blessing — sort of like learning that we have discovered 7 planets orbiting a “nearby” sun, then learning that it would take only 40 million years to travel there.

Anywho, not knowing if the flyer will appear or not, I’ll give you the highpoints. Thursday, March 2, from 6-7 p.m., I will be reading my poetry along with my friend and former colleague Kevin Craft, at the Hibulb Cultural Center located at 6410 23rd Ave NE, Tulalip, Washington. I have a new manuscript to read from, and Kevin has a new book, Vagrants and Accidentals (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, 2017), and I will be reading  new poems. from what I hope will soon be a real manuscript.

An open mike follows the reading. Kevin and I would honored to see you there.

kevin-craft

The Lives of the Heart

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lives-of-the-heartWhen I was getting an MFA in poetry, one of my professors admonished us to take on more complex subject matter. One doesn’t write about moons and hearts,” he said. But in her 1997 interview with The Atlantic, Jane Hirshfield offered some counter-wisdom. It’s an interview I have reread many times, and it seems to me that Valentine’s Day is a good day to share it with you.

Here’s an excerpt; for the full article, click on the link above.

It’s also true that for some years a central task in my life has been to try to affirm the difficult parts of my experience; that attempt is what many of the heart poems address. It’s easy to say yes to being happy, but it’s harder to agree to grief and loss and transience and to the fact that desire is fathomless and ultimately unfillable. At some point I realized that you don’t get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
-Jane Hirshfield

Jeanne Lohmann, 1923-2016

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I went searching this morning for a list of books by the Quaker poet Jeanne Lohmann to recommend to a friend, and learned that she recently died. I don’t know whether to be sad or to rejoice that the world got to share this woman’s light for such a long time.

Some years ago a poem of mine, “Such Good Work,” was a co-winner of the Jeanne Lohmann prize, and as a consequence I was invited to read my work for Olympia Poetry Network. I met Jeanne, who was then 80+, and I bought several of her books. OPN has invited me back twice as their feature — and both times it was a head-first plunge into the poetry mosh pit — such a wild and great group of people to read for and with. They very obviously revered Lohmann. And for good reason.

Here’s a poem reprinted in the Oly-Arts obituary; it is also reprinted on Cordella.org, where Lohmann’s voice reads aloud two other poems:

Questions Before Dark

Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down, consider
your altered state: has this day
changed you? Are the corners
sharper or rounded off? Did you
live with death? Make decisions
that quieted? Find one clear word
that fit? At the sun’s midpoint
did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites
the possible? What did you learn
from things you dropped and picked up
and dropped again? Did you set a straw
parallel to the river, let the flow
carry you downstream?

–Jeanne Lohmann

The Holstee Manifesto

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Where we began and what keeps us moving forward today. The Holstee Manifesto is a reminder of the values we live and work for.

Source: The Holstee Manifesto (includes a video representation — you can consider this my Superbowl ad — Bethany)