Rick Lupert on November 20, 2011

Village Poets of Sunland Tujunga are pleased to announce that the next Monthly Reading, on November 20, 2011 (Sunday), at 4:30 p.m. will feature Rick Lupert, poet, teacher, publisher of Poetry Super Highway and host of weekly readings at the Cobalt Cafe in Canoga Park. The reading will take place at the Bolton Hall Museum, on Commerce Avenue in Tujunga, California.


RICK LUPERT has been involved in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990. He served for two years as a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets, a non-profit organization which produces readings and publications out of the San Fernando Valley. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Los Angeles Times, Rattle, Chiron Review, Zuzu's Petals, Caffeine Magazine, Blue Satellite and others.

He edited A Poet’s Haggadah: Passover through the Eyes of Poets anthology and is the author of thirteen books: Sinzibuckwud!, We Put Things In Our Mouths, Paris: It’s The Cheese, I Am My Own Orange County, Mowing Fargo, I'm a Jew. Are You?, Feeding Holy Cats, Stolen Mummies, I’d Like to Bake Your Goods, A Man With No Teeth Serves Us Breakfast (Ain’t Got No Press), Lizard King of the Laundromat, Brendan Constantine is My Kind of Town (Inevitable Press) and Up Liberty’s Skirt (Cassowary Press). He has hosted the long running Cobalt Café reading series in Canoga Park since 1994 and is regularly featured at venues throughout Southern California.

Rick created and maintains the Poetry Super Highway, a major internet resource for poets. (PoetrySuperHighway.com)

Currently Rick works as a music teacher at synagogues in Southern California and as a graphic and web designer for and for anyone who would like to help pay his mortgage.

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Animal Hospitality

by Rick Lupert

I can tell which cat is walking through my house
by the sounds its paws make as they come
into contact with the wood floors.

At one in the morning when I finally arrive at my bed
Cleo walks in. She is the oldest cat. Not in the world,
just in the house. You can barely hear her since we took her claws
nine years ago. She propels herself to the bed
like a kite. No sound. No bounce. She makes herself.
comfortable. At five in the morning she will purr.

I’d tell you the name of my next cat is Tigger,
but then you would judge me.
He walks in like a pony wearing tap shoes.
If I make even the slightest audible sound or motion
he will rush to the bed and lick any visible skin
of mine he can find. I am okay with this.

Our third cat is larger than a moose. He’d come to
the bed but he can’t find room. His breathing is
louder than the president’s helicopter.

He will cry for his breakfast with the imperative
of Vietnam. You’re running a zoo my friend once said
to which I replied. Let me show you the Chinese

water dragon and the frog. Did I tell you I tried to keep
a bird alive that I’d found outside? It didn’t make it.
Did I tell you about the caterpillar I killed?

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VILLAGE POETS PHOTO ALBUMS

You may see the photos from our past readings in the Photo Album of Village Poets of Sunland Tujunga, posted on Picasa Web Albums, in the following location:

https://picasaweb.google.com/100602334921816625334/VillagePoetsOfSunlandTujunga


After Ruth Nolan's Reading, L to R: Maja Trochimczyk, Elsa Frausto, Dorothy Skiles, Taura Scott, Brian Story, Vanessa Marsot, Kathleen Travers, Joe DeCenzo, and Sharon Rizk. Seated, L to R: Rick and Kathabela Wilson, Ruth Nolan and Marlene Hitt.

The most recent featured poet, Ruth Nolan, read from her recent publications, the journal of desert poetry, "Phantom Seed" and a fragment of a new project, written in a persona of a Native American woman of a strange and traumatic history.


Ruth Nolan and Maja Trochimczyk with Ruth's books.

Ruth Nolan from Mojave Desert, October 23, 2011

On Sunday, October 23, 2011 at 4:30 p.m. Village Poets present Ruth Nolan as the Featured Poet of the Monthly Open Reading at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga.

Ruth Nolan is a Mojave Desert poet, writer, scholar, adventurer, and protector. She is a native of the Mojave Desert in the Apple Valley area and Associate Professor of English College of the Desert near Palm Springs, California. For two summer seasons, 1986-87, she worked for the BLM as a helicopter hotshot and engine crew firefighter in the California Desert District, and has extensively hiked, traveled, and embraced the essence of her desert homeland.

She is editor of the new anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts, published by Heyday Books. She was awarded a Joshua Tree National Park Affiliate Writers Residency for 2008-09, and recently collaborated on a film about the park with the UCR/California Museum of Photography. Her poetry has appeared in many literary publications, including Inlandia: a Literary Journey Through Southern California’s Inland Empire, Poemeleon, Askew, Pacific Review, Epicenter, Mosaic, Southern California Haiku Journal, and San Diego Poetry Annual.

She co-edits Phantom Seed, a bi-annual literary magazine dedicated to the nuances of the California desert, and is advisor to the College of the Desert literary/visual arts magazine, Solstice. Her poetry collections include Wild Wash Road (1996) and Dry Waterfall (2008.) She lectures and speaks widely on desert literature and related topics, such as desert conservation and California Indian culture.

Ruth Nolan writes poetry and prose pieces about her life and journeys throughout the desert, and also posts her original desert photography on her blog, Phantom Seedlings, at: http://ruthnolan.blogspot.com/