Posts

The Lord God Bird

Birdnote.org, etc.

/1 Comment/in , /by

Busy day in our country today, so I’m cheating a bit and just making announcements and reposting from elsewhere.

First, I have been meaning to tell you about two upcoming readings — as it is National Poetry Month, there are many, all over the place —

  1. I’ll be reading at Edmonds Bookshop on Thursday, April 17, 6:30 p.m., with four other poets from David D. Horowitz’s Rose Alley Press; besides David and myself, you can hear Carolyne Wright, Jane Alynn, and Jed Meyers, 10 minutes each. It will be fun.
  2. I am a featured poet at Everett Poetry Night‘s open mike on Monday, April 21. This is scheduled 5-8 p.m., and, yes, I have been there before, but I don’t think it begins at 5:00. More like gathering begins. People grab food and drink and chat. When I tried to pin this down (I can’t be there until 5:30), host Duane Kirby Jensen said, “Show up when you can!” Everett Poetry Night has a page on Facebook, too, but after Nov. 5, I left Facebook so can’t send you there to fact-check me.

I was up early this morning and read a chapbook that I am preparing to review for Escape Into Life (EIL). Rather than try to come up with another book, and a post here, I am reposting the April 4 episode of Bird Note, featuring none other than my dear friend, poet, and Empty Bowl Press editor Holly Hughes.

It is 11 minutes — features 3 of Holly’s poems from Passings (click on this link to see my review of Passings) — and is so so worth it.

Bird Note, April 4, 2025

https://birdnote.org/podcasts/birdnote-daily/poet-holly-j-hughes-honors-birds-weve-lost

At Holly’s website she includes a quote from Jane Hirshfield, “Poetry is the practice of attention.” So is all of life, a lesson that our poems might teach others.

 

image from All Trails

National Poetry Month: poetry book #1

/0 Comments/in , /by

Welcome to National Poetry Month!

If you are looking for a full rundown on what NPM is, skip over to https://www.napowrimo.net/ for a prompt a day and links to lots else. I also want to recommend Chris Jarmick’s blog, Poetry Is Everything. Chris, the owner of BookTree in Kirkland, Washington, will happily provide you with great quotes, prompts (daily in April!) and more links to poetry enthusiasts. I notice that rather than posting daily (as I believe he has in past Aprils), he is lumping the prompts into groups. If you are patient, you can find all of them. (And write 30 new poems!)

The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
― Dylan Thomas

I have a modest goal this month of sharing a poem a day from the pile of books beside my desk. Some of these I read in August during the Sealey Challenge. Others — well, it’s about damn time. I may not read a book a day, and I’m not pushing myself to do the usual blog reviews (though some may ensue), just this: one book, one poem.

Today it is Bones in the Shallows: poems from Mission Creek by Seattle poet Tito Titus. I reviewed his I can still smile like Errol Flynn (Empty Bowl Press, 2015) a few years back.

Tito Titus’s Mission Creek is located near Cashmere, Washington, and runs into the Wenatchee River. (Forgive me if I have any of this wrong.) As the title, Bones in the Shallows, suggests, the creek disappears every summer, drained by drought, by natural disasters, by greed. And in this slim book the creek, its creatures, and the people whose lives are lived on its banks are lovingly chronicled. Nature can heal us, Titus all but says, but only if we don’t destroy it first.

 

October coming down

How do you describe a creek?
Twenty cubic feet per second, the engineer said.

I toss a slender woody shoot,
watch it meander through ripples,
fouette through eddies,
dive from glittering rocks,
float toward the Wenatchee River —
a one-legged ballerina, dancing
toward the ravenous Columbia.
Past the equinox now, the creek
runs ten-feet wide, a few inches deep.

Still, no rain.

Now I know — in this parched tenth month —
how much water the upstream orchards
swallows when fish rotted on dry rocks:
enough to seduce innocent Coho
climbing freshwater reaches,
unaware of the Mission Creek murders
of their cousins, only a month before.

Twenty cubic feet per second,
enough to pretend the drought is done.

— Tito Titus

In “Last summer on Mission Creek,” we get a sense of all the beauty at stake:

Sumac leaves, stark and dark green,
wrestle summer winds.

Creek burbles play. Their watery laughter
climbs our woody bank.

And this poignant line: “My life becomes more beautiful than I knew, / and faster, too!” That’s nature’s power to renew itself, and our spirits.

Titus and his wife of 40 years now live in Seattle. You can find a copy of Bones in the Shallows at Edmonds Bookshop, or visit www.poetfire.com.

 

Poetry Month Happenings

/0 Comments/in /by

In lieu of a poetry book for today’s blogpost (I am reading a “Selected” and didn’t get through it — skipping long story about why), here are two links to today’s events.

One is my poem, “It Is Made of Broken Parts,” posted this morning at One Art.

 

The other is the amazing Rexville Grange Art Show, running until April 16th, and, today from 1:30-2:30, hosting my writing group reading poetry and prose. Click on this link to go to their website:

https://rexvillegrangeartshow.com.

And a head’s up: next week, I’ll be reading alongside two other poets at Edmonds Book Shop, Thursday, April 20, 6:30-7:30. For information, click on this link (or visit Rose Alley Press): https://edmondsbookshop.indielite.org/event/third-thursday-art-walk-poetry-night-2023.

Ann Spiers, Back Cut

/0 Comments/in , /by

BACK CUT, Ann Spiers. Black Heron Press, PO Box 614, Anacortes, WA 98221, 2021, 88 pages, $16 paper, www.blackheronpress.com.

I had dropped by Edmonds Bookshop to quickly pick up Sharon Hashimoto’s book of poems, when this slim volume (too) caught my eye. The cover is black, but has darker blocks set into the background. The title, in white letters, is partly cut away.

On the back cover, testimonials from poets we’ve already heard from this month: Kevin Miller (“a love story weathered and brined in the wilds of the Washington coast”); Sharon Hashimoto (“mastery of such unspoken, yet tender emotions”). Inside, more testimonials. And the poet’s introduction:

In felling a tree, the initial deep undercut is wedge shaped. This cut determines the direction of the fall. Opposite and higher than the initial cut is the back cut, the first of the felling cuts. The labor varies with tree, axe or saw, and with the crew’s strength and smarts.

Having grown up not far from the wild Washington coast, I found familiar voices in this cycle of love poems. The husband and wife (whose voices alternate) scrape a living from the shore and the trees. They escape fires. The wife plays piano. The husband—a veteran of WWII—drinks. They make a life.

It’s difficult to excerpt this book (you sort of have to read the whole thing). But here’s a sample:

Husband—
Putting Up For Winter

The glut
we net smelt out
of the wave’s long running
eagles snag silver scattering
crazy

salmon
so plentiful
their splishes racket up
stream    bear smell hot at every
trail turn

so thick
huckleberry
milked from the stem plunk plunk
in our buckets     fresh scat purple
with fruit

so much
we cannot stop
bigger loads just one more
woodstove glowing into the night
horse clams

—Ann Spiers

Some of poems are in numbered parts. All are spare, no punctuation, no ands or buts — all those little “stage directions” such as yet, then, next, “I thought,” and so on that I find in my poems — anything unnecessary stripped away, life itself, stark, shining. The subject matter reminded me of my family, and these voices, hard-bitten, “briny,” took me back. I came away from it wanting to write, which is one of the reasons I value doing all this reading of poetry books every April.

Ann Spiers is poet laureate of Vashon Island, has several art-chapbooks, and teaches poetry writing. You can learn more about her (and you should!) at http://annspiers.com.