Examined Life

Join Griffith H. Williams and East Point West Press to celebrate the launch of Examined Life: A Western Washington Poets Network Anthology. Hand set in lead type and printed on an old cast iron letterpress, the chapbook includes the work of 40 poets, from Bellingham to Vancouver, Washington. Along with Williams, a selection of poets will read from the collection on Wednesday, June 26, 2024, at 6:00pm at Village Books.

P.S. Note that readings from the chapbook will continue: July 3 in Auburn; July 6 in Kirkland; July 19 in Gig Harbor; and July 29 in Everett.

REMINDER: Every Third Wednesday and Saturday

We mentioned the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art just a couple of days ago (in connection with a reading by Rena Priest), but it has been two years since we posted about the Artist’s Book Collection at BIMA’s Sherry Grover Gallery. While you can browse the collection in its glass cases during regular (free!) museum hours, 10:00am to 5:00pm daily, you can get a closer look and more details on the books during a guided visit. At 11:00am on the third Wednesday (except today, with is Juneteenth) and the third Saturday of every month curators and guest tour guides host small-group visits to the collection, which now numbers close to 3,000 individual pieces.

For additional details (and inspiration!) visit the Artist’s Books Unshelved YouTube video series (63 and counting!) exploring selected pieces from the Cynthia Sears Artist’s Books Collection.

You Are Here

As U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Ada Limón has launched You Are Here: Poetry In Parks, an initiative to install poetry on picnic tables in seven national parks. The site-specific installations will each feature a historic American poem that connects in a meaningful way to the park. The first was celebrated on June 14, 2024, with the placement of “Can You Imagine” by Mary Oliver on a picnic table at the Beech Forest Trailhead on the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Over the coming months, Limón will travel to each park for the poem’s unveiling:

• June 21, 2024 – Henry M Jackson Memorial Visitor Center Plaza (in Paradise), Mount Rainier National Park: “Uppermost” by A. R. Ammons
• June 23 – Crescent Beach Day Use Area at Redwood National and State Parks: “Never Alone” by Francisco X. Alarcón
• July 12 – Ledges Shelter (or Environmental Education Center if inclement weather) at Cuyahoga Valley National Park: “The valley” by Jean Valentine
• July 20 – Oconaluftee Visitor Center at Great Smoky Mountains National Park: “the earth is a living thing” by Lucille Clifton
• October 8 – Royal Palm Area/Ernest Coe Visitor Center at Everglades National Park: “Ecology” by June Jordan
• December 3 – Mica View Picnic Area at Saguaro National Park: “Na:nko Ma:s Cewagĭ / Cloud Song” by Ofelia Zepeda

Find more information, including event times and links to the poems, on the National Park Service Poetry in Parks page.

put a stamp on that poem

With the summer season comes the annual Poetry Postcard Fest. We’re big fans of the PPF and post about it each year.

The idea is simple: register (before July 4) and your name is added to a list of 32 participants. On about July 4, the complete list is emailed to the list’s members and each day (between about July 4 and August 31), you write a spontaneous poem on a postcard and send it to the next person on your list until you’ve mailed all 31 (you can send yourself a postcard, but you don’t have to). In turn, you’ll receive a bounty of postcard poems.

You can use commercial cards or make your own. You WILL need to purchase stamps, including some international stamps since the PPF is worldwide. Please NOTE that postage rates go up on July 14, 2024. The current postcard rate (for cards that conform to Post Office regs) is 53 cents; on July 14, the rate goes up to 56 cents. (Letter stamps go from 68 to 73 cents; International stamps for letters and postcards go from $1.55 to $1.65.) If you stock up on Forever stamps now, you’ll save.

If you’re in the Seattle area, consider participating in the FREE Postcards From Here event on July 14, 2024, 11:00am, at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. Three long-time PPF poets will facilitate workshops focused on their personal approaches to writing and sending first-draft poems on postcards.

Write a poem a day during the Poetry Postcard Fest and you could be ready to publish your next chapbook this fall!

Blueprint*

2024 Merit Award
By Samantha Daily

I was never given a blueprint for making hearts.
This is probably why yours came out wrong.
I’m sorry
for putting the arteries in the wrong spot,
for turning you pale and blue,
for putting you into heart failure
before your one-minute birthday.
They say the womb is the safest place for a baby,
but the most dangerous place for you
was in the body of an incompetent seamstress
who couldn’t tell an aorta from a pulmonary trunk.
I was expected to know how to make one
just for having a uterus and a pulse.
My only tools were Mother Nature and Zofran,
prenatals and twenty-three borrowed chromosomes,
low-dose aspirin and paternal baggage.
So when you were born with a broken heart,
I figured it must be because mine never healed.
How can I be expected to build a whole child
when all I have for reference is the hole inside of me?
How can I ever expect you to forgive me
for passing on the most broken part of myself?
A zipper now separates the halves of your body,
a memento from when you survived both heart surgery
and your mother’s first attempt at life.

*Copyright © 2024 by Samantha Daily. Broadside designed and illustrated by Angela Boyle.

Setting the Tone, an Offering

This is a guest post by Georgia Johnson

For the last two years or so, I have had the honor and pleasure to emcee the Madrona Poetry Series, a monthly community poetry reading at Pelican Bay Books in Anacortes that usually draws an audience of 30-75 folks.

After the readings, our guest poets and performers frequently send me emails to say how welcomed, attended to, and loved they felt, far beyond any expected audience response.

How does this — does any — event move us closer to ecstasy? How do we narrow the gap between presenter and audience?

We might train ourselves to notice vibrations occurring around and through us. This may mean identifying and even unlearning or ignoring the wash of familial and cultural information we live with every day. It might mean letting go on emotional levels, and holding a frequency that feels clear. This may take practice; it is a practice. Suddenly, at a reading, or a concert, we are elevated, feeling what seems like electricity, immense joy. We make profound connection.

We are matter. All matter is made up of energy fields, diverse and hopefully friendly frequencies. This is good! I have found that inviting a collective moment of gratitude, humor, and perhaps a bit of humility — actually seeing those in the room, using very particular words to invite blending of frequencies — helps to set this tone. Perhaps you were there and contributed to the tone. Thank you.

These ideas are evolving through a study of esoteric texts, through meditation, asanas, and breath work, by my limited understanding of physics, and my own practice in poetic expression. My poems, the ones that sparkle with something I didn’t know I knew, that take that wild perfect turn just when I think I can’t find any more to say, that point to or are grounded in the huge collective universe, come by this practice.

On occasion I use a prompt to wake up the sleepy poet. Mostly I’m called by that rush of words that might land in my lap at any moment, day or night. I write down that transmission as best I can; if it has a tail, I hang on. Sometimes it bites. I have a file for those.

To waken this attunement, this resonance — in myself, in my poetry, in our audiences — is my mission. Sometimes I succeed. Always, I believe, it’s worth another try.

. . . . .

Georgia Johnson
Food Wrangler Poet, Rebel

Poet Georgia Johnson lives on a farm, on Fidalgo Island, on the Salish Sea. She lives with a husband, cat, and all the resident critters 80 acres might hold. The author of Just Past Dew Point, she has found purpose as chef, teacher, meddler and rebel over around 70 years. You might find her in the audience, at the podium, or in the kitchen, most days.

. . . . .
top photo: Madrona Poetry Series reading at Pelican Bay Books, photo by Georgia Johnson

Rena Priest: Writing as Refuge

Spend a summer evening on Bainbridge Island with Rena Priest on Monday, June 17, 2024, at 7:00pm, at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

Rena Priest: Writing as Refuge presents Rena reading from her forthcoming collection, Dancing to the Ticking of the Doomsday Clock (Abalone Mountain Press), and talking about how her most recent work was shaped by interactions with audiences during her term as Washington’s 6th Poet Laureate.

Also note that Rena will be on the faculty of 37th Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, July 8-14, 2024, at Wallowa Lake Lodge, Oregon. Registration is still open.

summer reading

It’s not quite summer, but if you’re updating your summer reading list, here are some fresh recommendations:

• CBC / Radio Canada – 37 poetry collections to watch for in spring 2024
• The Guardian – The best recent poetry – review roundup
• HipLatina – 15 Poetry Collections by Latina Writers Coming Out in 2024
• Literary Hub – Holding Up Mirrors to the Self: 7 New Poetry Collections to Read This June
• CNN News 18 – 5 Poetry Collections of 2024 You Won’t Regret Reading
• School Library Journal – 4 Poetry Books About the Great Outdoors

The Feeling of Freedom*

2024 Walk Award
By Laylah Cornelsen, 6th grade

Toward the simple
Things
Green pastures
Fresh water
Apple slice
They nudge us
Toward outdoor
Adventures
The dust hitting
My face as I
Trot through the
Arena
That one barn
That one horse
That one trail

*Copyright © 2024 by Laylah Cornelsen. Broadside designed by Angela Boyle and illustrated by Megan Carroll.

on poetry

“I don’t sit around thinking about the past very much. After my poems were printed, I rarely saw them unless I had to read them. I never learned any of them by heart. It was always the new poem I was interested in.”

Ruth Stone
(June 8, 1915 – November 19, 2011)

. . . . .
photo: Ruth Stone in 1977 – COURTESY OF DAVID CARLSON
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