The Poetry Show

The monthly Poetry Santa Cruz reading on March 12, 2019, featured poets Christopher Buckley and Gary Young.

About Christopher Buckley, from Poetry Foundation:

Poet and editor Christopher Buckley earned his BA from St. Mary’s College, MA from San Diego State University, and MFA from the University of California-Irvine. He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, including most recently Star Journal: Selected Poems (2016). With Gary Young he has edited the anthologies The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (1999), Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poetry and Poetics from California (2008), and One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form (2013).

Buckley has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is professor emeritus at the University of California-Riverside.

About Gary Young, from UCSC faculty page:

Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest book of poems, That’s What I Thought, won the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books. He was Santa Cruz County’s first Poet Laureate, and he teaches Creative Writing and directs the Cowell Press at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Farnaz Fatemi and Dion O’Reilly talk to Wilma Marcus Chandler about In Celebration of the Muse– an acclaimed event in its 37th year  featuring woman writers reading their work. We hear a little of the history of The Muse from Wilma, one of the founders, and then some participants read their poems.

Featured poets are Nancy Gomez, Rosie King, Maggie Paul, Carol Brensel, Jessica Cohn, Danusha Lameris, Dion O’Reilly, and Farnaz Fatemi. In Celebration of the Muse will take place March 23rd at 7:00 PM at the Center Stage Theater in Santa Cruz.

This edition of The Hive poetry collective was broadcast on KSQD Santa Cruz, on Sunday, March 10, 2019.

Episode two of The Hive, in which poet Dion O’Reilly, and Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Danusha Lameris discuss the work of poet Tony Hoagland, who died in October of 2018. We tell a story or two, read some of his poems, and discuss his craft, controversy, and legacy.

Broadcast Sunday, March 3, 2019 on KSQD Santa Cruz, FM 90.7.

On February 17, 2019, local poet Dane Cervine joined host Dennis Morton to read from and discuss the new anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California.

Dane is one of 149 California poets who contributed to this outstanding new collection, edited by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan, published by Scarlet Tanager Books.

This broadcast was the debut of the weekly Sunday evening poetry hour on KSQD, 90.7-FM in Santa Cruz, California. See also our previous podcast, of the February 12 Poetry Santa Cruz reading, featuring Dane and five other poets from Fire and Rain.

Ken Weisner launched his new poetry collection, Cricket to Star, with a reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz on January 27, 2019.

 

From the Bookshop events page:

Join us as we welcome Ken Weisner for a reading, discussion and signing of Cricket to Star (available beginning January 27th at Bookshop Santa Cruz). His third collection of poetry, his first since 2010, eases in with nature poems that meditate on solitude, the wilderness within, and childhood—then steps down into the manuscript’s underworld…mourning the rupture of a marriage. Section three meditates on “remaking” the psyche, and moves into elegy, meditations, and the tonal refuge of irony; section four re-enters the natural world, the world of desire, and the healing gaze of love.

“There is so much pleasure to be had in Cricket to Star, Ken Weisner’s latest collection of poems, I didn’t want it to end. Weisner is like that one amazing friend, smart, funny, large of spirit, a gifted raconteur. Whether he’s describing the Truckee River and its ‘singing mouths’ or riffing on ants in his bed as ‘wise men come to the Bethlehem of my body,’ he imbues his lines with exuberance and grace. His gaze is by turns wounded, ecstatic and patient, but always ‘busy, uncovering something human, something splendid.’ I’m reminded of the bards, those consummate poets and singers who traveled the countryside. ‘He could balance chairs on his nose while juggling plates, or sing arias blindfolded,’ Weisner writes in ‘Dream.’ He might be dreaming of himself.” —Ellen Bass

“Weisner is the generous master of all possible landscapes, an inexhaustible lover and sufferer, a poet of the lyrical, whimsical and bitter truths of our times.” —Elizabeth McKenzie

Ken Weisner enjoys his day job as a De Anza College Community College English teacher, where he both advises and edits Red Wheelbarrow, their literary journal. He coordinates, with Poetry Center San Jose, the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. For fifteen years, Ken edited Quarry West out of Porter College, UCSC. Ken has published two previous volumes of his own poetry with Santa Cruz’s Hummingbird Press, including Anything on Earth in 2010. Ken’s poems have appeared most recently in Perfume River Poetry Review, Catamaran, Caesura, Nine Mile, Porter Gulch Review, and Phren-Z. Ken also teaches poetry writing at Salinas Valley State Prison.

Dan Gerber and Patrice Vecchione, read for Poetry Santa Cruz and a large appreciative audience on Tuesday, December 11, 2018, at Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz.

Dan Gerber is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently, Particles: New and Selected Poetry(Copper Canyon Press, 2017). He is also the author of three novels, a book of short stories, and two books of nonfiction. A former professional race-car driver, he has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He lives in Santa Ynez, California.

According to Adrienne Rich, “Patrice Vecchione is one of those steady, vibrant, serious and passionate temperaments who continually replenish our sense of communal creativity. In my country of possibility, she and people like her would be nationally honored figures.”

Patrice has made communal creativity the backbone of her life through her writing workshops for adults and children, the books she’s authored and the anthologies she’s edited. Forthcoming next spring is Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience, a collection of 64 poems by poets from or whose families are recently from countries including El Salvador, Vietnam, Mexico, Sudan, Iran, and the Philippines.

 

We enjoy hearing that past Poetry Show guests are doing well, and receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant qualifies as doing very well indeed.

Natalie Diaz visited the Poetry Show at KUSP in 2013, one of three guest poets that evening. The others were James Baker and Tomas Q. Morin, and all three were on the road to promote new books published by Copper Canyon Press.

To celebrate Natalie’s good fortune, we’re re-posting the podcast from June 9, 2013.

 

On October 9, 2018, Poetry Santa Cruz was pleased to present poets Zubair Ahmed and Matthew Siegel. Thanks to Felix Kulpa Gallery for making the reading space available.

Zubair Ahmed was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His first book, City of Rivers, was published in the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. He was named a Top Debut poet in 2012 by Poets & Writers, and his work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, and Believer, among others.

 

 

Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was shortlisted for the Best First Collection of 2015 by the Forward Arts Foundation in the UK. Poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, Tin House, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, he currently teaches literature and writing at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.