Gates Reading
Bless their hearts, my department has just asked me to give the annual Gates Reading at Seattle Pacific University, this year.
Image by David Wittig
Bless their hearts, my department has just asked me to give the annual Gates Reading at Seattle Pacific University, this year. They had asked if I could recommend suitable candidates to bring to campus for the event, an endowed reading series named in honor of long-time educator Fan Mayhall Gates, and I dutifully furnished a list. X would be great. Oh, I wonder if we could get Y. Then, the reversal. We'd like you to give the reading this year, one of them said, and then, you're the right poet at the right time, which I just found, and find, so endearing.
If also a bit intimidating. I haven't any sense of the scale of this thing, or whether I can find that many people in and around Seattle who want to come hear my poems, but last year's reader was Suzanne Wolfe, who novel "Confessions of X" just won the CT Book of the Year award. Before that, Jennifer Maier, whose career I've watched since attending her first book's release party over ten years ago, and before that Gina Ochsner. As I say: daunting.
But what fun! Since they asked, it's all I can think about. Will my (current?) (former?) students come? Will friends from Northwest University make the great trek across the lake? Will the bookstore stock copies for sale at the reading, or should I bring them?
Because of the timing, this will act as the de facto book release party. We'll see how much the campus community comes out to support their fellows; I can't really surmise. The Roethke Memorial Reading Series at the University of Washington usually has people sitting in the aisles, but then, the last time I went the reader was Paul Muldoon, so. Meantime, I'd better design some posters. And pick some music to play beforehand as people file in. And make sure the book is indeed available by then.
Those of you in the Seattle area (and those with surpluses of airline miles) are most cordially invited to attend.
27 April 2017
7:30 pm
We Three Kings
This coming 2017 is going to be a great year for poetry.
This coming 2017 is going to be a great year for poetry. Apart from my own poems, coming in March from Cascade Books, my friend and sometime traveling companion Kevin Craft is publishing his second book, Vagrants and Accidentals with the lovely University of Washington Press. Craft's previous book Solar Prominence is full of formal fun and closes with the poem "To an Amphora, Salvaged," which is one of my top ten favorite poems ever, by anyone, and which I read on my podcast here.
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Webster, another dear friend and my erstwhile colleague at Northwest University, is publishing his first collection of poems on Anchor and Plume. I wrote the following endorsement for the book's rear cover, so I won't elaborate here. Suffice it to say: I'm excited for the next year.
After so much posturing on the parts of pundits, preening celebrities, poets on the picked through street market of the avant-garde; after so much hollow flash, so much essentially genre-bent lineated prose of small epiphanies; after so much, well, else, Jeremiah Webster's After So Many Fires comes out of the Pacific Northwest like rain: greening everything, cleaning the language, sharpening the eye, casting a slant-lit wonder about this whole good God-haunted earth, and, most importantly, allowing again a kind of deep breathing.
- You can pre-order Webster's book from the A&P website
- Or order Craft's from the UWP website
- Watch this space for ordering info for Phases.
Happy 2017, readers!
Big News
A little bit ago, I posted about my new poetry collection, 10+ years in the making and how I was ready to send it out. I'm excited, deeply humbled, a little giddy and a little scared to say that it's been picked up for publication this year by Cascade Books.
Phases
A little bit ago, I posted about my new poetry collection, 10+ years in the making and how I was ready to send it out. I'm excited, deeply humbled, a little giddy and a little scared to say that it's been picked up for publication this year by Cascade Books. I sent to them because
- they're based in the Pacific Northwest (and if this book is set anywhere [other than Rome] it's set here
- they have a small, carefully curated poetry roster, including Luci Shaw, Paul Mariani, Brad Davis, and Jill Peleaz Baumgaertner: poets I admire, all
- they published Joel Heng Hartse's Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which I adore.
I'm calling it Phases, because it's more moon-y and map-like than self-concerned and confessional. Currently, I'm busy culling the manuscript of weaker poems and adding in some newly finished pieces that better fit with the press series. More "Sir John Donne" than "Jack Donne, rake," if you take my meaning.
I've just had the news so it's all a little dizzying right now, but watch this space, follow my Fb page, twitter, or tumblr for (sporadic, non-spammy) updates. Meanwhile, rejoice with me!