A blog of announcements for Seattle Poets Gathering. A social group of poets and other writers based in Seattle, we meet every two weeks, Sunday afternoons, alternatively at Brouwer's in Fremont and The Pine Box on Capitol Hill. Meetings are free and open to the public. Please join us!
May 30, 2009
Request for collaboration with photographers in Los Angeles
Hello ! My name is Jerome, and I help organize a new, small photography group here in Los Angeles. I have an idea for a project involving poetry. Maybe we could collaborate? Basically we could take poems written or selected by your member artists and attempt to expose photographs that capture what the essence of the poem means to us, or a message given directly by the poet/writer? And vice versa! We expose photographs, be they abstract, macro, street or any other genre, and your group attempts to expose them through words?
Photographs narrated by the master poets?
What's do you think ?! These clubs are great, but lets collaborate !
Jerome 'Ro'
The Lens Society
877-828-7786
thelenssociety@yahoo.com
May 28, 2009
Call for submissions: Villanelle anthology
May 25, 2009
Summer Readings: Julene Tripp Weaver & others
Julene Tripp Weaver is pleased to announce her poem, "Over Here, Over There," has been published in Drash! This poem was written in a variation of a 12th Century Arabic form, Zajal, a call and response form traditionally sang. Come hear me read it at a series of Drash publication readings, coming near you soon!
The First Drash Northwest Mosaic Journal, Publication Reading is this Sunday:
May 31, 3 - 4 pm, Ravenna 3rd Place Books, 6504 – 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA
Additional Drash publication readings where Julene will read:
Saturday, June 6, 7-8:45 pm
Temple Beth Hatfiloh, 201 Eighth Ave SE, Olympia, WA
Saturday, July 25, 4-5:15 pm
Fremont Library, 731 N. 35th St, Seattle, WA
Also coming up, Ginsberg's Birthday Party reading! Come and celebrate Ginsberg & hear some smoking hot poetry!
Thursday, June 4, 7:30- 9 pm
Celebrate Ginsberg's Birthday at “Zen & Poetry”
Featuring: Matt Watts, Deborah Woodard, Julene Tripp Weaver, Dana Guthrie Martin & Brian McGuigan
Richard Hugo House,1634 11th Ave, Seattle, WA
Sunday, June 28, 2009, 1-5 pm
Celebrate the third anniversary of the SoulFood Poetry Night with a special party and performances of music and poetry, featuring music and poetry by Band of Poets plus past featured poets!
Complete info at
May 20, 2009
Call for submissions: Bone Bouquet
We are currently seeking submissions for our first issue, which will appear as a downloadable .pdf at bonebouquet.wordpress.com in January 2010.
Please send up to five pages of your best work to bonebouquet@gmail.com. Your work should appear as an .rtf attachment or in the body of the email. Also include a short (50 word) biographical note. Simultaneous submissions are fine, as long as we are notified when work is accepted elsewhere. The reading period will remain open through October 15, 2009.
Some female poets we admire include Catherine Bowman, Mary Ruefle, Eula Biss, and Denise Duhamel.
Krystal Languell
Editor, Bone Bouquet
Call for submissions: Packingtown Review
We also seek submission of scholarly papers, including interdisciplinary scholarship, literary criticism, comparative literature, critical theory, rhetorical studies, cultural studies, and political theory.
We also accept for consideration interviews; critical reviews of books, films and the arts in general; genre-bending work that explores or challenges form; and graphic art and photographs.
Whether scholarly or literary, we welcome edgy, fresh writing that may be experimental or that explores boundary crossings of/between genre(s) and form(s). What does it mean when poetry and prose are indistinguishable? What is lost (or found) in translation? When literary form is fluid, what happens to the relationship between art and criticism? Between the creative and the scholarly?
Please send up to 8,000 words (excerpts of longer works are acceptable) of prose (or genre-bending pieces), 40 pages of drama, or 3 to 5 poems (no more than 10 pages) to:
Packingtown Review
UH 2027 M/C 162
University of Illinois at Chicago
601 S. Morgan
Chicago, IL 60607
Deadline: Review of submissions for the second issue continues through September 1. Response time is approximately three months. For more information, visit www.packingtownreview.com or email us at: editors@packingtownreview.com.
To order Issue 1, visit http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/pr.html
Apr 27, 2009
Reading: Frye Museum - Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease
2 pm
Beyond Forgetting is a unique collection of poetry and short prose about Alzheimer’s disease written by 100 contemporary writers—doctors, nurses, social workers, hospice workers, family members —whose lives have been touched by this tragic disease. Through the transformative power of writing, their words enable the reader to move “beyond forgetting,” beyond the stereotypical portrayal of Alzheimer’s disease to honor the dignity of those afflicted. Published in spring 2009 by Kent State University Press as part of their Literature and Medicine series and with a foreword by poet Tess Gallagher, this anthology forms a richly textured, literary portrait encompassing the full range of the experience of caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease.
The Frye is honored to host the first public reading from Beyond Forgetting. Readers are poet Tess Gallagher, editor/poet Holly Hughes, and contributors Jane Alynn, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Joanne Clarkson, Nancy Dahlberg, John Davis, Alice Derry, Arthur Ginsberg, Joseph Green, Esther Altshul Helfgott, Denise Calvetti Michaels, and Kay Mullen. The book will be available for purchase at the event.
Alzheimer's & Poetry through the Ages
If you haven't seen it, give a click, especially the node section.
Apr 22, 2009
A Translation Experiment
Designed by aka for the WPA @ RICHARD HUGO HOUSE
Saturday 25 April 7P
$8 advance ticket sales
DANCING A POEM
Can you dance a poem? Can you arrange a poem in flowers? Can you move a poem from language to language without losing its message? I want to know.
7pm - "Translation Panel" includes guests Lyn Coffin (poet & translator), Vanessa DeWolf (performance artist & writer), Andrea Lingenfelter (literary translator), Zachary Schomberg (poet and literary translator) and Debby Watt (experimental musician, vocalist, performer).
8pm - “Around the World in Poetry.” An hour of multi-lingual readers in the Hugo House theatre, non-poets from other cultures will share a favorite poem.Hebrew, Romanaccio, Spanish, French, German and Japanese.
9pm - “A Translation Experiment.” Five artists will present one secret source poem (hidden from the public until the end) in their various "languages." After you see/hear/watch the poem performed multiple times in various genres, you will be asked to write the poem and contribute it to a visual art piece. On your way out, you will be given a sealed envelop with the source poem in it. It is up to you when you open this (straight away or much later in the comfort of your own home).
This day-long festival also includes a morning translation workshop by local literary translator Andrea Lingenfelter, who will work from Chinese (cost $60), and an afternoon workshop with WA State Poet Laureate Sam Green who will work with poetry as a translation of the life experience (cost $80). Register for a workshop. Just before the evening experiment, there is a panel discussion on translation moderated by literary journalist Dave Jarecki of Portland, OR. This is included in your ticket price. Tickets will be on sale at the door for $10 starting at 6:30pm.
Apr 21, 2009
It's About Time Writers, Thurs. May 14, '09
Emily Warn is the author of The Leaf Path, The Novice Insomniac, and Shadow Architect all from Copper Canyon Press in 2008. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Blackbird, BookForum, The Bloomsbury Review, and The Writer’s Almanac. She has taught creative writing for Lynchburg College in Virginia, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and most recently served as the founding editor of poetryfoundation.org. She will be speaking on Poetry and Personal Identity.
Rochelle Kochin and her husband Levis Kochin live in Seattle where they raised their four children. Since retiring from Boeing, Rochelle spends her time writing, traveling and telling stories to her American and Israeli grandchildren. Her short story Angel of Death appeared in the second volume of Drash.
Joshua Isaac, 36, has been expressing himself creatively since childhood with several published pieces of poetry, prose and an award winning documentary film. But his work has been defined by his ongoing eleven year battle with cancer. This Seattle native finds that his greatest gifts are his wife and three children. Josh's film "My Left Hand" is at http://mylefthand-themovie.com/default.aspx
Carmen Germain is a co-director of the Foothills Writers Series, Peninsula College, Port Angeles. Pathwise Press published Living Room, Earth, in 2002, and Cherry Grove published These Things I Will Take with Me in 2008. On academic sabbatical in 2007-2008, Carmen was a Visiting Artist/Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, working on a manuscript and researching the work of the Italian post-war writer Elsa Morante. She and her husband live in northern British Columbia in the summer.
Apr 10, 2009
THE LENIN POEMS– Our First Strut

First public reading of THE LENIN POEMS
Friday 17 April at 6:30pm at the Phinney Neighborhood Association
THE LENIN POEM judges are happy to announce that we received over 50 beautiful Lenin poems – poems both small and light, large and serious, in English and Russian, and in rhyming and free verse. We want to thank the poets of Fremont, and of the world, for taking on this challenge. Someone from Austria submitted work! And we think all of their hard work is worth celebrating and want to begin by sharing some of the submissions at The Phinney Center on Friday 17 April 2009. We welcome you to join us. The reading will be 30 minutes long.
THE LENIN POEMS will strut their stuff on Friday 17 April at 6:30pm at “Art On The Ridge,” an event organized by Nicole Stremlow-Monahan at the Phinney Neighborhood Association. A Lenin Poem contest winner has not been chosen. This reading offers a sneak peek into the submissions that sit now on the desks of comrades & judges Vanessa DeWolf, Gregory Crosby and A. K. Allin.
THE LENIN POEMS was conceived of by poet/artist A. K. “Mimi” Allin(aka "The Poetess at Green Lake"). There is a statue of Vladimir Lenin outside of the Space Building in downtown Fremont where the artist has a studio. As do many Fremont residents, the artist passes the statue everyday. She knows its history, where it was cut to be disassembled for transport, the name of its artist, buyer and seller, and its current cost. She even knows the dates it was made, discarded, re-found and shipped to the U.S. She knows that those bronze chunks behind the figure are meant to be the flames of revolution and that the statue stands 16 feet tall while Vladimir himself stood 5.5 feet tall. But what the artist DOES NOT KNOW is how the people of Fremont feel about this statue and how Lenin feels about the people of Fremont and what that all might mean to the people who live here and visit. I asked the poets to begin to explain. And they have.
April 1st 2009 was our contest deadline. Submissions are now being compiled and sent to the judges. Judges will take two months to consider a winner. Once a winner is chosen, that one poem will be cast in bronze and placed with the statue. The judges will then choose the best of the rest to be included in a print publication called "The Lenin Poems," to be “publicly poured” over the statue on 4 July 2009. This "pouring" will read as both performance and publication date. The hope is that these poems will be seen, taken, read and remembered.
THE LENIN POEMS
17 April 2009
6:30-7:00pm
Phinney Neighborhood Association
6532 Phinney Ave N Room #1
Art On The Ridge
(206)510-3421
Apr 9, 2009
Untitled [Intersection] - Friday 24 April 2009
SHIN YU PAI & KRIS WHEELER
Friday 27 April 2009
7PM at The Phinney Center
6532 Phinney Ave N (Seattle)
$5 -10 includes wine reception
POETRY. Shin Yu Pai is the author or seven books of poetry, including most recently, Sightings: Selected Works (2000 - 2005) and Works on Paper. She is the recipient of grants from 4Culture and the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. She has collaborated with theatre and dance companies, composers and visual artists. For more information, visit http://shinyupai.com
PERFORMANCE ART. Kris Wheeler has been making for over 20 years. Kris Wheeler came to Seattle to study Skinner Releasing Technique in 1974. She soon became a member of the dance company Joan Skinner directed (American Contemporary Dance Company, re-named Skinner Releasing Dance Company) and performed in collaboration with fabulous musicians, locally and on tour, for the next decade. Having danced with Danny Lepkoff for a year in the early 70's, she introduced contact improvisation to the Seattle community and hosted regular contact jams. Aerial dance became her passion from the mid-80's to mid-90's, flying over stages around the country with Robert Davidson Dance Company. She taught in the Skinner Releasing Summer Intensives for 13+ years, at the University of Washington for 6 years and one summer at Naropa Institute. She is a psychotherapist with 23 years of private practice, and continues to dance and perform locally.
ALL HAIL PODIUM-FREE POETRY!!!
Apr 2, 2009
May, June 2009 readings + sign-up time
Here are the May and June line-ups.
Thurs. May 14, 2009 #237 Rochelle Kochin, Carmen Germain, Josh Isaac + Emily Warn on The Writer's Craft
Thurs. June 11, 2009 #238 Deborah Woodard, Michael Daley, Priscilla Long + Bethany Reid on The Writer's Craft
To sign up for a reading, check the About Time site and email me your date preferences
Thanks,
Esther
eahelfgott2@comcast.net
Mar 21, 2009
Finishing Line Press Group Reading
Please join us at a Finishing Line Press Group Reading
When: Saturday, April 4, 2009,
Time: 2—3 PM
Who: Julene Tripp Weaver, Betsy Aoki, Jane Alynn, and Lana Ayers
Where: Elliott Bay Books, 101 South Main Street, Seattle, WA
Mar 17, 2009
The Poetry Playground - Weekly Classes (Tuesdays 7-9pm)

From the crazies who brought you THE POETRY POLAR BEAR CLUB, now offering ongoing, weekly, drop-in classes at The Fremont Abbey Art Center, Tuesday nights from 7-9pm, starting Tuesday, 24 March, 2009. THE POETRY PLAYGROUND is facilitated by A. K. “Mimi” Allin.
THE POETRY PLAYGROUND
A place to stretch your poet and play with words. A place to practice physical poetry. A place to test your tools. This is not a poetry reading, critiquing circle, performance or acting class. This is a playground. We’ll use games, exercises and prompts to free our poet. Intended for artists of all genders, genres and levels, who work (or wish to work) from poetry. Be prepared to move, talk and play, alone and in groups, to create on the page and in the round. We will not sit in seats at tables.
EXERCISE YOUR POET $10
Ongoing, drop-in, weekly sessions, 7-9 pm, Tuesdays. Classes meet at The Fremont Abbey starting on Tuesday, 24 March, 2009. 2 hrs on the playground, pay-as-you-go, $10/session. No stress. Generative play. Just show up. Pay in person, cash or check.
INSTRUCTOR
A. K. “Mimi” Allin, The Poetess at Green Lake, spends her time developing interactive poetry performances. An instigator of social dialog, Allin teaches poetry guerilla poetry to youth and adults. She has been performing, projecting, installing and instigating poetry since 1997. Allin, who earned her MA in Poetry from City University of New York and founded the monthly poetry & performance series Untitled [Intersection], will moderate all playground sessions and performances. Special guest co-instructors will be announced.
INQUIRE
mimiallin@gmail.com
Mar 16, 2009
Call for Submissions: Court Green
Each issue of COURT GREEN features a dossier on a special topic or theme. For our seventh issue, we will feature a dossier on The 1970s.
We would like to see poems on all that decade entailed, as well as the legacy thereof. We are as interested in poems that invoke the icons of and engage with the stereotypes of the 1970s as we are in poems that explore more tangential or atypical aspects of the decade. Poems of all styles and modes -- historical, personal, political, confessional, formal, experimental, regional, global, nostalgic, critical, hybrid, and especially those styles and modes the editors have not yet foreseen -- are welcome. We are not looking for critical/academic works at this time.
Submissions for dossier and regular sections of the magazine are welcome.
If you would like to submit poems for either or both sections, our submission period is March 1-June 30 of each year.
We do not accept more than one submission per poet during our submission/reading period. Please note that we do not accept more than five pages of poetry.
Email submissions are not accepted. Please supply a SASE for notification only. Submissions will not be returned. Poems submitted outside our reading period will be returned unread.
We will respond by August 31.
Submit to:
Editors
COURT GREEN
English Department
Columbia College Chicago
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605
Please note: Poems sent through submissions services are discouraged and may be returned unread. We strongly encourage anyone interested in submitting to COURT GREEN to read a recent issue of the magazine before submitting. For information about ordering copies of Court Green, please see our contact page:
http://english.colum.edu/courtgreen/contact.html
Mar 14, 2009
Raven Chronicles: Food Culture Reading (April 25)
We would also like to honor all the editors who have chosen work for this site:
Jeannine Hall Gailey, who is recovering from broken bones!
Elizabeth Myhr, who now edits the Nature Writing section (and we have added a new wonderful photo to the site) http://www.ravenchronicles.org/Nature/natureindex.html
Anne Fraser
If you would like to read poems and can join us, please let us know.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Poets read works celebrating Food & Culture.
In conjunction with National Poetry Month.
Invited readers and open mic.
April 25, 2009, Saturday, 4:00-5:45 p.m.
University Branch Library, 5009 Roosevelt Way N.E.
Seattle, WA 98105
Free
Mar 12, 2009
Translation with Andrea Lingenfelter
10am
2-hr Translation Workshop
Andrea Lingenfelter
Meet at Hugo House 9:45am
Pre-Registration required / Register now
$60 workshop
TRANSLATION WORKSHOP DESCRPTION:
There are at least as many ways to translate a poem as there are readers of that poem. Work through a poem from the source language (Chinese) to English with an experienced translator of Chinese poetry. We will look at different aspects of the poem and the discuss some of the problems, both practical and theoretical, that translators encounter in the course of the translation process. No knowledge of a foreign language required. Instructor will bring materials. Supplies: students should bring paper and something to write with. This class will meet at Hugo House at 9:45am on Saturday 25 April. It is the first event of the Spring Poetry Festival. Afterwards, students are welcome return to Hugo House for a welcome message and a social with Sam Green, David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg.
BIO:
Andrea Lingenfelter is a poet and translator of contemporary Chinese poetry, fiction and (on occasion) film subtitles. She has lived and worked in China and travels there regularly to meet with writers and buy books. Her translations of contemporary Chinese poetry have appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies. She is also the translator of the novels Candy, by Mian Mian (Back Bay Books), and Farewell My Concubine by Lilian Lee (William Morrow and Company). In the spring of 2008 she received a Pen Translation Fund Grant to translate Annie Baobei's 2006 novel, Padma. She is currently working on a collection of translations of poetry by Zhai Yongming for Zephyr Press. Future projects include Wang Anyi's novel Qimeng shidai (The Age of Enlightenment) and a volume of translations of work by Shanghai poet Wang Yin.
ONINE INTERVIEW:
Here's a link to an interview I did with Zhai Yongming, China's leading feminist poet, about a year ago, with a few poems: http://fulltilt.ncu.edu.tw/ The interview is in Issue #3, but I also have work in Issue #1, and I'm planning to have an interview with my friend Wang Yin in Issue #5.
Mar 7, 2009
aka reading | performances
A. K. Allin & Vanessa Dewolf perform/read together on Thursday 19 March, 7pm, at Soul Food Books in Redmond. This will be Allin's first long reading since "Soviet Poetry" at Soho20 in NYC, a slide show of epigrammatic poems over Modern Soviet Art with percussion by Greg Stare of Rare Bird Rumba Ranch. Expect the off kilter.
FREMONT PLACE BOOKS
The very next night, Friday 20 March, 7pm, Allin will perform at Fremont Place Books with the dapper Aaron Silverberg and the therapeutic Laurie Scullin. In typical Allin fashion, this will not be a reading so much as a happening. Bring your witness.
A. K. “MIMI” ALLIN produces poetry on the page and off, by way of public installation, urban maneuver, and collaborative and solo performance. “AKA” has whispered poetry through a 300-pound block of ice, painted it on umbrellas, and put it in the middle of a labyrinth cut into a lawn with hand shears. Allin formed close ties to the Green Lake area of Seattle by sitting at a desk there every Sunday from 9–5 for one full year. Her efforts were quickly returned by an enthusiastic and supportive public. Documentation of “The Poetess at Green Lake” and more recent “aka instigations” can be found online at http://thepoetessatgreenlake.blogspot.com/.
VANESSA DEWOLF creates interdisciplinary poetic works of text-based performance. Her work often combines narrative & poetic language with visual & movement processes. Her training: figure skating, M.A.in Playwriting at Boston University under Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott, somatic practices, alternative dance, improvisation, printmaking, and more. She grew up in the mountains and is currently a valley dweller. She runs an artist residency program at Studio Current for performance artists, a unique opportunity to support artists in process & practice via rigorous dialogue with each other. She is a facilitator of Field sessions and has bee the director of The Field-Seattle, an artist driven peer review organization that cultivates reflective feedback with artists from all disciplines. Her work has been seen in Alaska, Boston, Germany, Tacoma and various venues throughout Seattle including: Untitled Intersection, Ten Tiny Dances, Fisher Ensemble, Velocity Dance Center, Freehold Studio Lab Theater, and many more.
AARON SILVERBERG has written 2 books, "Thoreau's Chair" & Diamonds Only Water Can Wear."
LAURIE SCULLIN is a local therapist, who writes because its in his Irish blood and writing is a relatively cheap addiction.
Mar 6, 2009
Untitled [Intersection], 27 March 2009
Friday 27 March 2009 @ 7P
The Phinney Center in Greenwood
$5-10 donation
Featuring the incredible, the wonderful, the wildly popular
JEFF ENCKE
PRIYA KEEFE
JACOB JANS
AMANDA LAUGHTLAND
DANAE' CLARK
No podium. No page turning. No hands stabbing the air. Just 4 terrific poets offering 15-minute workshops. And in between classes, you're invited to partake in TRAVELING HEARTBEATS. Let performance artist, Danae' Clark, listen to your heart. Watch her translate your unique beat into a watercolor painting.
All hail podium-free poetry!!!
Feb 26, 2009
Red Sky celebrates Irene Drennan
Please join us
Sunday, March 1, 2009
A Tribute to Irene Drennan with Esther Altshul Helfgott, Priscilla Long, Denise Calvetti-Michaels, Anne Sweet and Diane Westergaard
PLUS Open Mic!
Sign up at 6:30
Reading starts at 7:00
Richard Hugo House
1634 11th Street