call up some poetry

Several years ago, when opportunities for in-person poetry were limited, Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani launched a Tele-Poem program for National Poetry Month. The poetry hotline is back for 2024 with new voices and new poems as well as an archive of poems from previous years. Call (503) 928-7008 and hear poems read by Laureates Paulann Petersen, Kim Stafford, Elizabeth Woody, and Mojgani.

“It’s just a little door into a small room of quiet,” Mojgani says.

Thursday in Portland

Join Cascadia Field Guide co-editor Derek Sheffield and contributors Barbara Drake, David Oates, Joe Wilkins, Kim Stafford, Nancy Slavin, Paulann Petersen, and Travis London, this Thursday, July 27, 2023, at 7:00pm, at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon.

Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books) blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into thirteen bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more! Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more.