Village Poets Hosts Themed Reading on Sunday, Sept 28 with Poets Cecilia Woloch, Suzanne Lummis & Timothy Steele

 

The Foothills Poet Laureate, Kathleen Travers, will produce a Village Poets reading based on the historical connection Bolton Hall Museum had with the Utopia Movement in the early 20th century. The reading will take place on Sunday, Sept 28th. Travers has invited distinguished poets Cecilia Woloch, Suzanne Lummis & Timothy Steele to feature. There will be a limited open reading with readers encouraged to read a one minute poem which can be on the theme or not as they wish. The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 10110 Commerce Ave, Tujunga, CA 91040. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913. Our reading starts at 4:30 pm and goes till 6:30 pm. Refreshments will be served. Free parking is available on the street and also at Elks Lodge 10137 Commerce Ave. Park behind the building and walk a short distance to Bolton Hall Museum across the street and down the block. 

 

Cecilia Woloch is a U.S.-born poet, writer, teacher, and performer based in Los Angeles. Her honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Center for International Theatre Development; her work has also received a Pushcart Prize and been included in the Best American Poetry Series. She has published seven collections of poems and a novel, as well as essays and reviews and her work has been published in translation in French, German, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hebrew and Romanes. Raised in rural Kentucky, she has traveled the world as a writer and teacher, giving readings, leading workshops at universities and literary conferences,. Most recently, she’s taught creative writing at Sichuan University in China and at the University of Rzeszów in southeastern Poland.  

The Summer of 1969

 Mary and I grew up fast

to get where the boys were.

I was twelve, she was sixteen, all summer

we shoplifted eyeshadow, costume jewelry, expensive

bikini underpants—treasure we hid in the green attic bedroom

that slanted our house like a ship.

We leaned from those high windows, solemnly

smoking our cigarettes into the dark.

Gypsies, our mother called us, letting us go

with the keys to the Ford.

I was Mary’s Little Sister wherever we went,

instead of my name, the one who followed,

rode shotgun beside her, watching my face in the side-view mirror.

That was the year I started to feel my sharp tongue in my mouth

and my skin had healed.

Mary was blond, with a waist like a funnel, thighs

spilling out of her cut-off jeans

 

and nothing could stop us—

not Daddy’s strap, not fear, not

Saint Margaret Mary’s, which we had forgotten.

I learned to inhale in the shadows behind

Neville Island Roller Rink; stars squeezed out of factory lights.

Boys I didn’t know, didn’t like,

kissed me in alleys, in strange back seats.

I was twelve, I remember the smells of leather and teeth,

the sense of doom.

 

By the next summer, Mary was pregnant.

They sent me away to an aunt in Virginia

but it was too late, already, by then;

my childhood was over,

my hair was wild and damp,

the boys in their haunted convertibles beckoned

again and again from the night.

 From Sacrifice (1997)

 Ghost Sycamore   

 The winter I knew you weren't coming back,
I ran down the hill from the house, the path

 through the woods turning red and gold with death
— dank leaves underfoot; branches twined overhead —

and, breathless, stopped where the lake begins,
having glimpsed, through the tangled mist, a glint

of something glimmering, silvery, bright —
I stepped from the shadows toward that shine

and suddenly, there, in the sky at my feet
on the lake's surface, shimmering, a tree —

or the ghost of a white tree, lightning-limbed,
that seemed to have risen up from within

the body of water, the body of sky —
and again, on the far shore, the other side,

the same tree — spectral, luminous —
bowed as in grief at the water's edge

where it stood among lush pines, bone-white, stark
— stripped of leaves, of rough outer bark —

old sycamore, old boundary-marker —father,
as I saw you in a dream, once, self and other

self, in this world and the next, as if a veil
between them lifted, then everything went still.

 From Earth (2015)

©  2025 Cecilia Woloch All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

Suzanne Lummis' fourth poetry collection will be published this fall by the edgier end of What Books  – their imprint Giant Claw – "Crime Wave."  She's the editor of Beyond Baroque Books' imprint, the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, and the editor of the just-released anthology, national in scope, Poetry Goes to the Movies.  Her individual poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Plume, The New Yorker, are in the current issue of Poetry Salzburg Review and forthcoming in Rattle.  Suzanne’s honors range from Drama-Logue awards and Women in Theater's “Red Carpet Award” to outstanding instructor awards and Beyond Baroque's George Drury Smith Award.  She was a 2018/19 City of Los Angeles fellow.

Those Poets Who Write About Loss

don’t tell the whole story,
how all night in your sleep—half
sleep—you throw your net out
towards that place it was last seen,
Loss-Thing. It drags
the parched ground, comes home
with nada, which you must add
to your larder, Nil Queen: nothing on
nothing, a haunting.
If only you could capture two fish, two
silvery slippers to try on for size,
then walk away across water,
start clean. All night you cast,
and its fall, threadbare, makes
a song on the empty air—
the starry net of your wanting.

Interlitq (2020), now LAdige

Medusa 2024    
- with a line by Ashley Cooke, student of Bill Mohr

I’m not much for parlor games,
     but if I had cards I’d, you know, lay them
          on the table. I don’t remember much, except
               for the rape—no, first that I was beautiful,
                    then what I want to forget. Snakes aren’t
                         slimy like some think. Neptune was,
                    and weedy from the sea. Gold, marble,
               ivory, cold then wet.  Minerva’s temple.
          Salt water in my lungs. In Ovid’s telling
     (if you put your trust in him), enraged
Minerva, victim blamer, made me this.
     Hmm… Could be.  There are such women.
          My hair’d been lovely like—
               you know Elizabeth Siddal?
                    Anyway, my hair’d been lovely,              
                                                      and now it lived.
               You folks trust Perseus, that naked guy?
          (Naked, if you like Ben Cellini’s take.)
     If so, then he’s a hero, and hero
of this tale. He’ll murder me again.
     These days, mostly, I’m just trying
          to keep it honest, get my story straight.
               Seems to me, they (Who’s They? You
                    tell  me) took all the sliding, writhing
               incarnations of the beasties in your world—
          Violence, Envy, Retribution, and oh,
               oh, oh, the Lies… (I could go on)
and attached them to my skull. Boys,
swordsmen, I’ll make you stones,
     pretty ones,
          agate, feldspar, bloodstone,
               tiger eye. Fair exchange, right? 

They’re my snakes now. 

 Poetry Salzburg Review, Spring 2025

©  2025 Suzanne Lummis All Rights Reserved

Timothy Steele holds degrees from Stanford University and Brandeis University and has taught at Stanford, UCLA and Santa Barbara, USC and California State University, Los Angeles, where he is a professor emeritus and President’s Distinguished Professor.  Steele’s five collections of poetry include The Color Wheel and Toward the Winter Solstice. Among Steele's honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Los Angeles PEN Center’s Award for Poetry, a Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, and the Robert Fitzgerald Award for Excellence in the Study of Prosody.
  

The Sheets

From breezeway or through front porch screen

You'd see the sheets, wide blocks of white

Defined against a backdrop of

A field whose grasses were a green

       Intensity of light.

 How fresh they looked there on the line,

Their laundered sweetness through the hours

Gathering richly in the air

While cumulus clouds gathered in

       Topheavily piled towers.

We children tightroped the low walls

Along the garden; bush and bough

And the washed sheets moved in the wind;

And thinking of this now recalls

       Vasari’s tale of how

 Young Leonardo, charmed of sight,

Would buy in the loud marketplace

Caged birds and set them free—thus yielding

Back to the air which gave him light

       Lost beauty and lost grace.

 So with the sheets: for as they drew

Clear warming sunlight from the sky,

They gave to light their rich, clean scent.

And when, the long day nearly through,

       My cousin Anne and I

 Would take the sheets down from the line,

We'd fold in baskets their crisp heat,

Absorbing, as they had, the fine

Steady exchange of earth and sky,

       Material and sweet.

 From Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986)

 The Swing

She shrieks as she sweeps past the earth 
And, rising, pumps for all she's worth;
The chains she grips almost go slack;
Then, seated skyward, she drops back.

When swept high to the rear, she sees
Below the park the harbor's quays,
Cranes, rail tracks, transit sheds, and ranks
Of broad, round, silver storage tanks.

Her father lacks such speed and sight,
Though, with a push, he launched her flight.
Now, hands in pockets, he stands by
And, for her safety, casts his eye

Over the ground, examining
The hollow underneath the swing
Where, done with aerial assault,
She'll scuff, in passing, to a halt.

 From Toward the Winter Solstice (2006)

©  2025 Timothy Steele All Rights Reserved