Wednesday, January 28, 2015

February 22 - Featured Poet B.D. Love for the Month of Love

Bolton Hall Museum, Photo by Teresa Mei Chuc

The Village Poets are pleased to invite poets and poetry lovers to the Monthly Reading at the Bolton Hall Museum on Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 4:30 p.m. Featured poet, B.D. Love, will be joined by those who wish to present their work at the Open Mike. Refreshments provided.




B.D. LOVE

B. D. Love grew up in rural Michigan, where he attended a typical rural Midwest high school.  That experience engendered a sublime love of poetry, through two wonderful teachers, and a severe distaste for authority, courtesy of a mindless Administration.  Old story.

Over the years since he has earned his M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Syracuse University, he has quite serious writing altogether, formed several punk inspired bands from Syacuse to Dallas to LA and once more Syracuse.  He returned to writing seriously after a freak accident shattered the elbow of his right arm, and he was told he’d never play guitar again.

Since resuming writing, he has published in a great many journals and literally magazines across the nation, and has shepherded six books to print, four full length fiction books, one full length poetry book, and two chapbooks.  He is currently “shopping' two new poetry books.   His most precious new project is a song cycle for which he as written lyrics, with the gorgeous, soaring melodies provided by the great Maura Kennedy, another Syracuse expatriate.  It’s called “Villanelle:  The Songs of Maura Kennedy and B.D. Love.”  Should appear this Spring.  Our holiday song, not really limited, is out on Amazon.com and iTunes and CD Baby.  There is a mutual photograph of us there.

This poem comes from my new book, “Hounds of Wonder:  Life in Dogs.”  It’s about rescue dogs and their special love.  And it is not sentimental.  This poem was featured in Nimrod International Journal, Lasting Matters…

Little Landers Declaration. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk


Declan IV


I hold a photograph of you sitting in a box
Half-full of trim from the ancient pepper tree
Whose leaves would choke the eaves and drives and vex
The neighbor lady, who pleaded for the penalty

Of downing — this for a being much of her time.
She’d pass, pure white, beneath the “dirty” limbs.
“There’s a fungus among us,” my mom would chime
By way of warning.  Indeed, there was.  Death has her hymns.

But here you are, roots in the mulch, your face
Courting the camera’s heart.  The shutter clicks
And off you go to sniff all crones and grace
All trees with piss before a smaller box

Arrives to collect the last of the dust to fall.
Some old limbs creaked that night.  I heard their call.

__________________________________

(C) by B.D. Love
First published in Nimrod


Photo by Teresa Mei Chuc


Photos from the January Reading by Teresa Mei Chuc and Ross Canton will soon be available on Picasa Web Album. Here's our group at the end of the reading:

Front: Toti O'Brien, Alice Pero, Teresa Mei Cuc, Ross Canton, Joe DeCenzo and Maja Trochimczyk




Sunday, January 11, 2015

Teresa Mei Chuc and Ross Canton Feature on January 25, 2015

Rainy day in Big Tujunga Canyon. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk

The Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga invite you to our first Monthly Reading Series of the New Year on Sunday, January 25, 2015, from 4:30-6:30 p.m., at Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave., Tujunga, CA 91042.  We are delighted to announce that poets Teresa Mei Chuc and Ross Canton will feature at this event! Poets are welcome to bring their poems and sign-up for the open MIC upon arrival.  Light refreshments will be served and a $3.00 donation is appreciated.  



TERESA MEI CHUC

Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of two poetry books, Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012) and Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014). She was born in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War while her father remained in a Vietcong "reeducation" camp for nine years. Her poetry appears in journals such as EarthSpeak Magazine, The Good Men Project, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Hypothetical Review, Kyoto Journal, The Prose-Poem Project, The National Poetry Review, Rattle, Verse Daily and in anthologies such as New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press, 2010), With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014), and Mo’ Joe (Beatlick Press, 2014). Teresa’s poetry is forthcoming in the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees.

New poetry book, Keeper of the Winds: 


First poetry book, Red Thread:

A review/interview on CounterPunch:



Pencil

"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have
forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing."

- Vincent Van Gogh


A missile is shaped like a pencil -
its long, slender body and pointed
end creates history.

A girl walking down the street
a few steps ahead of her sister and friend,
two medics who were trying to help
injured people, the parked ambulance -
all were annihilated by the same weapon.

Above, drones - silent, unmanned planes.
A metal, predatory bird that shoots a missile
with precision, identifying the colors of a shirt,
the features on a face - the shape of a nose,
the color and length of a mustache.

In a room far away, in another country, a man
sits at a desk and looks at a screen; he strokes
his thick, dark mustache as he carefully
contemplates, then pushes a button.

There is a charred hole in the ground
where the girl once stood.

There are pencils that write and erase,
write and erase, so that there is nothing
to be read on the page. The page blank
as the desert sky, blank as the smooth shell of a drone.

There is a family drinking mint tea
in a living room.
The man holds a cup to his lips,
the glass touches his mustache.
A silent bird hovers above.
In a split second, everyone is dead,
the house is in rubbles - arms, legs,
splattered organs among broken concrete.

Soon, there will be no trace.


“Pencil” first appeared in Mo Chapbook (Silkworms Ink) and  The Good Men Project



Another poem, "Mekong River":




Chemtrails in Sunland-Tujunga, Fall 2014. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk




ROSS CANTON

Ross Canton is a poet, playwright, filmmaker, novelist, and director. His work has been published widely in literary journals in the United States, England, and Australia.  He graduated from UC Santa Cruz where he studied under such luminaries as George Hitchcock, editor of Kayak, Gregory Bateson, and Norman O. Brown, and received his MFA in Poetry and Non-Fiction from Vermont College of the Fine Arts.       

His books of poetry include Involving Residence, No Thanks, Walking Water On Earth, The Art of Naming, and The Endurance: Journey To Worlds End, a lyric novel.  He is also the author of You Don’t Know Me, a novel, The Light Where Shadows End, a memoir, and a number of plays and stage adaptations. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Studio Theater West in Santa Monica, and the founder/originator of Movie/Poem, Inc. a multi-media platform for cross-genre poetic expression.  He lives in the Los Padres Mountains where he, his long time companion, and his four dogs often spend meditative afternoons contemplating the serenity of trees.


“A Noiseless Spider” (Revisited) 
                                                         (for Walt)                                            

Just a fuzzed blur of legs fleeing across the rim
of my eyes—but then the tiny, black body leaps off
and hangs mid-air, ten inches or so below my lenses—

too far from the ground to jump, nothing near enough
to send a line to unless I tip my head so he can repel
onto my chest and skitter across the elephant grass

sprouting from my Hawaiian shirt—and so he simply
dangles there, swinging and twisting like a window-
washer fallen from the scaffolding of a tall, tall

building, dangles--upside down, legs working hard
to secure a hold—no before nor after, no god to know
the gossamer’s meaning as he spews out another

thread to hold him, nothing but my hand pulling
the filament off my glasses and holding him between
two fingers, holding, then raising him up so I can

finally fix him in my sight as he swings back and
forth as if on a pendulum, holding, and then, care-
fully, carrying him outside where a slight breeze

catches and throws him above my head as I open the
door, throws and almost sets him free--till I lay him
down on a blade of grass where he lies still, feigning

death, before suddenly scuttling away, vanishing into
a crevice of dark, green, bodiless shadow--O my soul!



Waking To Absence

Nothing new, just another black
molly among black mollies
gone—each unnamed, common,
no red stripe nor gold splotch
to distinguish the gone one
from the three still doing laps
round the coral trees, and yet,
having awakened so—sun
still swimming in the shadows
beneath the hills, my mother
sleeping in a home somewhere,
her flesh no longer communing
with her mind—having awakened
to this space left when a body
is swallowed after death, I press
my finger against the glass and

mark the place where loss remains.
Years, a year, a day, this wakeful
moment, this pink rose sky
blossoming from nightshade as it
crowns from the ridgeline—her face
bloomed to ashes, his to bone, mine
to this O, O, and out there, there
where the horizon ends and our
image-laden world begins, so my
morning begins, in darkness
fading, in what is not, but out of
that absence I sow the stars, the
verdant grass, the fish in their
tank of simple knowing, out of
that longing I sing what’s left
of song

Calla Lily in Descanso Gardens, photo by Maja Trochimczyk