Village Poets Welcomes Scott Ferry & Daniel McGinn in Poetry Dialogue

 Scott Ferry & Daniel McGinn will read from their new book of dialogue poems, "Fill Me With Birds" (Meat for Tea Press 2024) as well as other poems on June 23, 4:30 pm at Bolton Hall Museum. 

Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Suggested donation $5 per person for the cost of refreshments and to donate to the Little Landers Society that manages the Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91040. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.Extra parking at the Elks Lodge across the street (10137 Commerce Ave)

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as an RN in the Seattle area. Ferry's eighth book of poetry, Each Imaginary Arrow, is now available from Impspired Press. His book of prose poems, Sapphires on the Graves, is upcoming from Glass Lyre Press in spring 2024. Besides his collaboration with Daniel McGinnon Fill Me with Birds, he has also published Midnight Glossolalia(Meat for Tea Press) with Lillian Nećakov and Lauren Scharhag. Ferry is also an accomplished photographer. More of his poetry can be found at ferrypoetry.com.

 THREE POEMS BY SCOTT FERRY

 i ask

the ferryman for a map

of the underworld

 

he seems too busy

(wait, why am i in this boat?)

 

he turns back to me for a moment

and unzips the blistered seed of his face

 

and inside the endosperm

roots and batlungs flutter

 

his uvula buzzes

like a nest of wet wasps

 

and in the opening there is a light

which undoes light

 

i know now it is too late for

bargaining

 

the best i can manage

is obsolescence—

 

a few broken memories

signless streets faceless coins—

 

i enter gracefully

into the unbodied throat

 

as it sings off all of my

skin

i remember watching this documentary

on kirlian photography

when i was 8 or so

 

they took an electromagnetic

image of a leaf

 

and then cut off a section of it

shot another photo

 

and the second picture showed the mass

missing but the warm lightning

 

surrounding the amputation

still brilliant and connecting

 

the whole body in a string

of light

 

i didn’t know what to do with

this information which poured

 

out of the television

like a long lost song

 

i just knew it showed the grace

of our ghosts

 

even if broken still glorious

even if absent still

singing

Published in  the journal A Thin Slice of Anxiety

poem written with eyes closed

flickers of light like a jesus face in a window

face of light the rest dark plumbing

pipes and wires in the walls of the body

not a bird but a cough braying in my throat

after the flu when i lie down i cough as if possessed

my son shines a light in my face like a priest

like a doctor forgiving the illness of age

he checks all of my openings with a flash

a night diver seeking gold in a drowned cathedral

he says you try and i impersonate a healer

then i tell him it is time to close his eyes

and i hear the pipes and wires of his body

reach toward the last flicker of light and curl

into a deep filamented shadow of blood orange

i see the window and him inside

his enclosures but the ghosts trickle

through his walls like birds

and he breathes a tide

through a poem

blind as

god

Published in the journal A Thin Slice of Anxiety

 

Daniel McGinn’s work has appeared in Meat For Tea, Silver Birch Press, The MacGuffin, Nerve Cowboy, Spillway, Misfit, and Anti-Heroin Chic along with numerous other magazines and anthologies. His chapbook, Drowning the Boy, won the James Tate Poetry Prize for 2021 and was published by SurVision in Dublin Ireland. Fill Me With Birds: a free verse conversation written with Scott Ferry was published by Meat For Tea in February, 2024. He has been married to the poet and painter Lori McGinn 47 years, and he received an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts at the age of 61.

 THREE POEMS BY DANIEL MCGINN

Death by chocolate

He wanted to talk about the future

He took Death out for a cup of coffee

I assume you like yours black

He said to Death

Death said no

I’ll have a white chocolate mocha

with little marshmallows

floating on the top

Is that for here

the barista asked

Death said no

He’ll take it to go

Published in the chapbook Drowning the Boy  (SurVision)

The Visitor

When you said soup was time I agreed. It is soup weather and I already made some.I was grateful that I had a stove and pan. I was grateful for the roof over our heads.When you told me you saw the sun begin to laugh as it shredded the trees, I looked out the kitchen window at the clouds and the rain and the leaf bodies decomposing on the lawn. I wish I had seen the sun laugh. I would love to be astonished. The clouds over arctic wind blew the birds away. It’s no accident that snow arrives in stacks. It piles silence upon silence on my picnic table and deck chairs. It looks beautiful. I pushed my hands into it and it stung me. I like the kind of silence I can keep to myself, but I grow weary of snow. It’s the kind of beauty that makes me feel numb. It's good you’re here. I made soup. It’s soup time. Sit down, eat, tell me about your day.

Published in Fill Me With Birds

Faces in the Cliffs

Some people don’t have regrets. I can’t relate

to those people. I never could. I regret mistakes

I made yesterday. I disappeared into rooming

houses and hitchhiked for a few years. My past

didn’t know where I was. I hoped it wouldn’t

find me. The past didn’t care about me. I was

grateful for whatever drugs fell into my hands.

I would take them all. There was a time when

I didn’t trust people who didn’t do drugs. I didn’t

trust people. I became narcissistic like church

people. Everything said to me was run through

a filter of belief and disbelief and if I had

swallowed too much I’d remind myself this was

only for the moment. I’d taken a drug and chose

to allow it to take me. There was a time when I

couldn’t function. I’m okay now. When you talk

about faces in the cliffs, it reminds me of voices

in my walls. When they were loud, mine was just

a whisper. I saw a lot of things and then I broke.

I walked off the job at the sandwich shop. I couldn’t

stop crying. I took a psychic break. It’s never been

easy to write about this. People who have never

been there tried to define it for me. What do they

know? They weren’t there. I can tell you I’m sober

now, in this moment. I’m a different person, having

children changed me. I’m grateful for that. Look

how fragile we are. Look how beautiful.

 Published in the journal, Anti-Heroin Chic and Fill Me With Birds  (Meat for Tea Press)

 

 

 

 

 

Village Poets Hosts Passing of the Laurels at McGroarty Arts Center

 

On May 19, 2024 Alice Pero will pass on her Poet Laureate crown to Kathleen Travers in a joyous ceremony of music and poetry at The McGroarty Arts Center, 7570 McGroarty Terrace, Tujunga, from 3-5 pm. Alice, who is the 10th Poet Laureate of Sunland/Tujunga will be the last so named. Kathleen is the first Poet Laureate of the Foothills, the post given a new title in 2024 to be more inclusive of the whole Foothills area. Kathleen brings her arts history education and numerous community service endeavors to extend the reach of Poet Laureate.

Both poets will read their work and music will be provided by Dan West, pianist and Alice Pero who is also a flutist. Refreshments will be served. This is a free public event.

A fourth generation Angeleno, Kathleen Travers, has lived in her 100-year-old historic home in Sunland (which she restored) for more than 20 years.  With graduate degrees in Art History, Victorian Studies and Professional Writing, she has been the recipient of fellowships to the Prague Writers’ Festival and for post-graduate study at Cambridge University.  Formerly a high school and university educator, she is a historic restoration expert, specializing in architectural ceramic.  A preservation advocate, Kathleen authored the successful Historic-Cultural Monument applications for the Hills of Peace Cemetery and Cross of San Ysidro.  She served as docent at Bolton Hall for ten years, where she co-curated the Foothill Moderns exhibit and lectured on local artist Margaret Morrish.

Founding board member of arts and equity non-profit ST Forward, and volunteer for various homeless charities for 35 years, she’s in her 3rd year on the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council.

She has read her poetry at venues as diverse as Maddingley Hall, Cambridge, England, and Gasoline Alley, the L.A. Times Festival of Books and the Iguana Café.  She served on the board of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival in its glory years, and was a founding director of the Poetry Society of America in Los Angeles in the time of The Act of the Poet at Chateau Marmont. Featured in 49 local civic light opera and drama productions in decades past, and having sung with a bakers dozen of Los Angeles choral ensembles, her mezzo is currently in search of a choir, although she always has a song in her heart for life in Sunland-Tujunga.

                             Three Poems by Kathleen Travers

 What Remains

         to Itzhak Perlman for November 18, 1995, Lincoln Center

The great musician staged his entrance rites,

a halting broach of center, sat, and then

the solemn pageant pared the metal truss

from limbs, and lastly raised the violin:

the bow hit gut, exploding twang and snap

sharp echoes amid gasps.  And wonder, would

he litanies of lurch repeat, or mute

await fresh fiddle or new string?  Eyes closed,

he signaled to begin.   And modulating

every step with ease and grace, he played

to awestruck hush.  Applause!  He smiled “In art

sometimes we find what music we can make

with what is left.”  So life, we make at first

with all we have – and then, with what remains.

 Stages of grief

v.  acceptance

 

Tangled prone in August's

tawny grass                                                   

the marble trunks wait

and yearn to stretch upright.

 

Their ordered pride

and pediment crown

stained by sun cycles,

and the glint of their colors

on the sea they rose above --

these they have forgotten,

the pillars of Sounion

 

but not the feeling of whole,

or the need to be partnered,

roofed and sheathed

in seamless stone,

made new in union with each other.

 

So long since they have seen

beyond the hues of tall grass

to the source of sea-roar

and its endless reach,

things they once vowed to see again;

so long they have forgotten everything

but the longing so interminable

it seems the proper way of being.

 

The View from the Cross

The Cross of San Ysidro, Mt. McGroarty, Tujunga

San Ysidro, Patron Saint of Little Homes, was not a saint of the Catholic Church, according to John McGroarty . . . He was a Spanish peasant,  and his name, McGroarty said, indicates he was probably a Jew. . .  Thus the dedication of this monument was sponsored by an organization of laymen, held around a cross that was raised in honor of a “saint” who was a Jew, and blessed by a Catholic priest during ceremonies involving all Protestant organizations in the Valley. 

– Wallace Morgan –The Record-Ledge

Booster Bard, wove the fabled life of San Ysidro – in which

the saint had ceased his work to help the grandam find her goat,

whereupon (in his absence) an angel took those labors up.

A parable in which self-interest was replaced by the

spirit of benevolence – For in the hard life of farming

dry and rocky soil, only with each others help could one survive

With the convert’s passion, and the spirit of a man reborn

(having thrown the shackles of nocturnal asthma in the sweet

and solemn-breathing air of the Verdugos) the Scribe sold

the broken colony his ecumenical hopes – so much so

they built his cross in weeks, and pledged to find the funds to light it.

Perhaps by raising it, a monument with manifest ideals,

a people perpetuate such standards. Perhaps not. But consider this: On the antipodal Verdugos in July of ‘24, the Times reported on quite different pageantry beneath a cross – rather, several – burning as eight hundred on the Glendale hills joined that city’s Ku Klux Klan.

or this: that when ‘30s Tujunga Jewry formed their Temple Shomrei Emunah, Guardians of the Faith, the Women’s Club gave them a home, five years, while they built. This while La Crescenta’schapter of the Bund held pro-Nazi rallies at their parks, and Pasadena practiced covenants excluding Jews and papists.

Four months, and they had lit the cross – and in a time when night pulled

a drape of perfect darkness on the hills, the Cross was more than

cross, but spoke of noble-minded roots, what they valued in others

and hoped for from themselves. And perhaps in those black nights, its light

was consolation for their failed Utopian dream, broken

by the harshness of life in a place known as the Rock.

 

                                                  

 

In her four year tenure, as the 10th Poet Laureate of Sunland/Tujunga, (officially installed in 2022, two years late because of the pandemic,) Alice Pero continued her work with children teaching poetry in schools, took over the post of Artistic Director of the Village Poets readings, published “Beyond Birds & Answers” (2021, Elyssar Press) with New York City artist, Vera Campion, published poems in various journals in print and on line, including “Pratik”, “We Are Here,” “Crystal Fire” and she also began serving as Monthly Contest Chair for the California State Poetry Society. She frequently features in venues and festivals around Los Angeles and also appears as a flutist in a number of settings.

                                       Three Poems by Alice Pero

 Green by Water

It was today that all my stories turned green
when I took a walk in the wash
where rain had made cracked brown earth
sprout green and yellow and purple
Leprechauns were disguised as mischievous lizards
scuttling across my path
The snakes did not bother any
They had been sent away by a being with a crooked stick
The rushing stream at the foot of the hills
crashed noisily over the stones making nothing of drought-disaster-sayers
who had been deposited in the ocean at end of stream’s run
All our hot, dry fissures filled

 published in California Quarterly

a thimbleful of now….

A thimbleful of now

with no dust or breath

I slurp it up, like nectar

of a sweet peach

On my windowsill

a potful of here

No flower grows

the air is fresh

I feel the green

Clear wind of present

blows in my garden

no one hears

no one sees the roses

nodding,  “Yes”

Barter

I will trade a memory of oatmeal
(the one with the really sweet milk)
for a taste of potato chips, very crisp
 
The coffee on the airplane that
made me high I will give
for the belly laugh when George on Seinfeld

rescued the golf ball from the whale
 
But if you didn’t save that one
I’ll trade an old Ernie Kovacs Show
for a glimpse of the Degas dancer girl at the Met
 
I will exchange the feel of satin
on my first prom dress (bright blue)
for six orange peels dried in the
softest sun of summer
 
Will you take the smell of asphalt in
spring, steaming after rain
for six ripe plums waiting in
the basket on the porch?
 
I can give you the grandchild’s shy smile
when I gave her a ballerina doll
but you must give me the sound of
oranges falling off the tree
with the slightest bit of wind added
 
There is a sprig of bougainvillea, very red
that jumps off the wall,
What will you give me for it?

 published in Minnetonka Review