don’t miss this reading!

Back in the spring, we put up several posts about Pulitzer Remix (here, here, here), the National Poetry Month project sponsored by the Found Poetry Review in which 85 poets “found” a poem for each day of April from a chosen book.

Artist and poet Sheila Sondik selected The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and from the novel created a dazzling series of poems. Egress Studio Press has now published the collection in a beautiful hand-sewn chapbook, Fishing a Familiar Pond, that also includes two of Sondik’s prints.

On Sunday, September 8, 2013, at 4:00pm, Sheila Sondik will introduce and read from her book at the Village Books Readings Gallery. Mark your calendar and don’t miss this reading!

Sustaining Wonder

If you’ve been participating in the August Poetry Postcard Fest, in which each poem is a postcard-sized nugget, or if you tend toward short-form poetry, you might be interested in Sustaining Wonder. Carolyne Wright will teach this six-week class on Wednesday evenings at Richard Hugo House in Seattle with a focus on “longer narrative poems.” The class begins on October 30, 2013, and further details are on the Hugo House website.

September!

If you’re hungry for words, September promises to deliver. Thursday, September 5, 2013, brings together a number of voices from the literary journal Cirque for a reading at Village Books. The lineup includes Deborah Bernard, Bob Hicks, Rachel Mehl, Kate Miller, Sheila Nickerson, Anne Carse Nolting and Joe Nolting. (You may recognize some of these names as past Sue Boynton Poetry Contest winners.) The reading, in the Readings Gallery, is free and copies of Cirque will be available for purchase.

To warm up for the Cirque reading, which starts at 7pm, you may want to attend the VB Writes…Poetry Writing Group, which welcomes drop-ins, is also free and starts at 5:30pm on the Village Books mezzanine.

Watch this space for news of other worthwhile upcoming events, and also see the CALENDAR page, updated almost daily.

on being a poet…

“I don’t think I am any good. If I thought I was any good, I wouldn’t be.” John Betjeman (August 28, 1906 –
May 19, 1984)

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photo

more poetry walking…

Just the other day, we posted about “Poetry of the Wild” by Ana Flores. Somehow, this article by Susan Dunne in The Hartford Courant, about a recent Ana Flores project at the University of Connecticut at Groton, escaped mention in that post and it’s definitely worthwhile, especially for the accompanying photos. Shown here is a poetry box, “Seaside Studio,” made by Julia Pavone and Mark Dixon, which includes the Pablo Neruda poem, “Aqui.”

And as long as we’re doing follow-up posts, here’s another. We have previously mentioned the Sidewalk Poetry Project in Northfield, Minnesota. This year, the project’s third, eight local poets had their poems selected from a field of 121 submissions and will have their poems added to the growing collection. More on the City of Northfield website.
. . . . .
Photo by Richard Messina, The Courant

escaping the page…

Daniel Patrick Helmstetter works with words, often unsticking them from their pages or pixels, turning them into signs, environments and (did we mention labor-intensive?) installations. For example, here’s a Design Work Life post about Danny’s Continental Cocktail Lounge. Here’s the murals and installations page on Helmstetter’s Tumblr. And here’s a link to a studio visit with the artist/poet. Wander around among his words.
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Steep and Drink : A Study in Grey Orchids

a weekend in November…

Escape from the early-winter doldrums to three days of creativity. Registration is now open for the sixth annual Northwest Writers’ Weekend, with three instructional classes (poetry, creative non-fiction and songwriting), readings/performances by instructors and participants, writers’ circles, time for writing on your own, six meals and lodging for two nights, all in a beautiful wooded setting with a lake and walking trails in Port Orchard, Washington. Find out more and register on the Northwest Writers’ Weekend website or like NWW on their brand-new Facebook page.

more poetry boxes…

We’ve written before about poetry boxes, which are cropping up in neighborhoods everywhere. The artist Ana Flores is creating poetry boxes “to engage communities with their landscape through poetry, art and hiking.” In southern Rhode Island, Colorado Springs and Mystic, Connecticut, Ana Flores works with local residents to build and install boxes that contain “poems about nature and a journal for public response.”

Read more about Poetry of the Wild and Ana Flores, including an article in September/October 2013 issue of Poets & Writers.
. . . . .
Thanks to Susan J. Erickson for the heads-up on Ana Flores.

…and thanks!

Generous support for the 2013 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest has been provided by:
Anonymous | Luther Allen | Bruce Beasley | Angela Belcaster
Bellingham Public Library | James Bertolino
the Boynton Family
Solon R. Boynton III & Sharon K. Boynton
Jerry & Beth Brownfield | BTV10 | Nancy Canyon
Ciao Thyme | Jennifer Lee Cottrell | Kat & Ed DeVaney
George & Mary Ann Drake | Sandra Dutton | Egress Studio
Susan J. Erickson & George Lindeman
Mary Elizabeth Gillilan | Norman Green & Sherwin Sarjeant
Elizabeth Kerwin | J.I. Kleinberg | David & Judith Laws
Paul Little | Tim & Suzanne Lucy | Andrew Shattuck McBride
Brenda Miller | Martin & Sheila Nickerson
Dr. & Mrs. L. Tim Nielsen, grandson of Sue Boynton
Jon Orvik | Judith Orvik | Jan Crook Pierson
Chuck & Dee Robinson | Kimberly Roe | Ellie Rogers
Boris Schleinkofer | Colleen & Harvey Schwartz
Sheila Sondik & Paul Sarvasy | Threshold Documents
Village Books | Denise Weeks | Kelly Welles
Whatcom Educational Credit Union | Whatcom Poetry Series
Whatcom Transportation Authority
the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest committee
and of course the poets of Whatcom County, Washington
THANK YOU!!

poetry plaques on view!

The 2013 Sue Boynton Poetry Contest Walk Award poems are now installed on plaques in front of the Bellingham Public Library, 210 Central Avenue. They will remain in place until summer 2014. Stroll by and read some poetry!