Ekphrastic Poetry Inspired by the Art of Sandy Fisher - Workshop by Pamela Shea, May 26, 2019

Where the Road Bends by Sandy Fisher

Village Poets invite poets and poetry lovers to its next event, Ekphrastic Poetry Inspired by the Art of Sandy Fisher - Workshop by Pamela Shea. It will be held on Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 4:30 p.m. at Bolton Hall Museum, 10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga, CA 91042. The reading will include poems inspired by the art of Sandy Fisher, and a Feature by Pamela Shea, Sunland-Tujunga's Poet Laureate in 2018-2020.  Refreshments will be served and $3 donations collected for the cost of the venue, the second historical landmark in the City of Los Angeles, that celebrated its centennial in 2013.  The Museum is managed by the Little Landers Historical Society.

FEATURED ARTIST - SANDY FISHER ON MAY 26, 2019

Creative outlets have been a lifelong pursuit of mine and I turned to oil painting in 2005, and was blessed to win my first award.  Finally, I had found the direction and purpose of my creative drive. Now, I cannot imagine doing anything else as painting is life itself for me. The landscape of the West and California, particularly the unspoiled open spaces of the coast, desert, valleys and mountains are my favorite subject matter.  I am especially intrigued by the play of light and shadow and the mingling of warm and cool hues, which captivate my heart and provides the catalyst for me to put brush to canvas in an effort to convey to the viewer my emotional response to the scene.

When asked about what motivates me to paint something, my answer revolves around the desire to share the powerful awakening in my soul, which is fueled by the infinite beauty and mystery of nature. To me, there is confirmation of the divine in the complexity of nature; with all its variety and intricacies. I fully believe at the heart of creating memorable art is the ability to reveal to the viewer what wonder lies in the everyday world around us. 

Through my many travels, I am provided with a bounty of unique environments. I love to capture the fascinating scenes and overlooked details of our planet, even if it is in my own backyard. I am especially attracted by all the nuance of color and values in a scene,flower, or object. By utilizing dramatic natural lighting of the early morning or late afternoon combined with compositional elements involving line, color, texture, contrast and shape, my hope is the viewer will be drawn to take a more intimate look.

SELECTED AWARDS AND EXHIBITS:

2018 Art Classic, SCAA, Honorable Mention

2018 Art Matters (Huntington Library) San Marino League – Juried Artist

2017 Art Classic, Santa Clarita Artists’ Assoc. (SCAA) 2 nd Place and Merit in Oils

2015 Santa Paula Society of the Arts, 79 th Annual Show – Juried Artist

2015 & 2010 First Floor Gallery, City of Santa Clarita, Juried Artist

2014 Hope Murals, Lily Oncology, Winner – One of Ten Nationwide

2014 “Icons of California” and “Splendors from the Garden, La Galleria Gitana

2018, 2012 & 2009 Solo Art Exhibit, Canyon Theatre

2011 Art Classic, SCAA, Honorable Mention

2011 & 2010 Outwest, Newhall, CA – Featured Artist

2010 Festival of Art, City of Santa Clarita, Juried Artist

2009 Burbank Art Festival, West Coast Productions, Juried Artist

2009 Art Classic, SCAA, Honorable Mention

2007 Art Classic, SCAA, Gold Medal

2006 Art Classic, SCAA, Silver Medal

2005 Art Classic, SCAA, Honorable Mention

FEATURED POET - PAMELA SHEA

PAMELA SHEA, the ninth Poet Laureate of Sunland Tujunga, has lived in the area for nearly 40 years. She is a writer and poet who chronicles her life through verse. Pam was born and raised in the foothills community of La Crescenta and studied at the University of Redlands. Her professional life has included medical office work, from which she is retired, and teaching in the fitness field, in which she is currently active. She has a long history of community service, which she has combined with her writing. She finds inspiration in family and nature as well as in triumph and strife. She enjoys sharing her poems in hometown open poetry readings. Poetry has been her passion and therapy for as long as she can remember. Her poems appeared numerous times in the local Voice of the Village newspaper, as well as in the monthly newsletter for Salem Lutheran Church in Glendale and the fundraising literature for the Health Ministries of the Foothills. Other poems appeared online in Village Poets and Poetry Laurels blogs.

Ms. Shea was a featured reader at the Shouting Coyote Performing Festival in 2004 and led a workshop at that event on the Poetry of Nature. Since then, she participated in many readings with the Wide Open Readers, led by Elsa Frausto, and the Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga at Bolton Hall Museum.  Pamela has hosted several open mic readings around town and has also written and read poems for special occasions at the Sunland-Tujunga Branch Library and McGroarty Arts Center.  She has also read at performances by The Windsong Players Chamber Ensemble and had one of her poems choreographed by California Contemporary Ballet in conjunction with the Windsong Players. She attended the 2018 Drawing Inspiration from the Parks program in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.  Her extensive record of community service includes many endeavors, such as volunteering for the Verdugo Hills Family YMCA's annual Campaign Support Fund Drive for several years. She was also a member of VHY's Senior Advisory Committee. She started a poetry group that met weekly at VHY as well as served as a board member for two terms (six years of service) for the Health Ministries of the Foothills. She has also been involved in the Relay for Life. Ms. Shea is the proud mother of three and grandmother of two. She has been married 43 years and has lived in the same house in Sunland for almost 40 years.

The next reading by Pamela Shea is at the ASKEW READING SERIES (Second Saturdays) May 11, 7:00-9:00 PM. Hosts Seven Dhar, Slim FitzGerald, & Ellie Askew. The Pasadena Highlands, 1575 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena 91104, between Allen and Lake Ave. Featuring Vietnamese Nink Poise, Sunland-Tujunga Poet Laureate Pamela Shea, and Christopher Nyerges (christophernyerges.com) + OPEN MIC. Free.

ARTWORK BY SANDY FISHER

We are asking poets to write poems to eight paintings by Sandy Fisher, more information about her will be posted later, here are just the paintings to view and write about.

Awaiting Monet

Autumn Ablaze

Break of Day at Big Rock Creek

Golden Hour in Owens Valley

Where the Road Bends

Springdale Sunset on Johnson Mountain

 Quiet Harbor

Sweet Whisper

PHOTOS FROM READING BY MARY FITZPATRICK

Village Poets' Featured Poet for 28 April 2019 - Mary Fitzpatrick and Paintings for Ekphrastic Projects for May

MARY FITZPATRICK

Mary Fitzpatrick is a fourth-generation Angeleno who holds a BA from UC Santa Cruz and an MFA from UMass Amherst. Her poetry career is divided in two parts, separated by 17 years. In Part II, her poems have been featured in Atlanta Review and North American Review as contest finalists, have been finalists in the 2010 Beyond Baroque and Inkwell Poetry Contests, as well as for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and the Slapering Hol Chapbook Award. Her work has been featured in Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review and North American Review where she was a contest finalist. Her poetry has been published in journals, including Agenda (UK), The Dos Passos Review, ASKEW, The Georgetown Review, on-line by Writers at Work (L.A.), as well as in Hunger Mountain, Miramar, The Paterson Review, and in anthologies such as Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles & Beyond and Cancer Poetry Project 2. Her corporate career included translating electric-energy innovations into human prose; she works as a communications manager in a large corporation. In her non-profit career, she boosted the fortunes of a small Catholic elementary school.

Basho's Death

not turning, standing still
the snow turning his black hair white
suspended in a bronze gong’s
chime not turning
phrases in his mind but letting the notes alight
and write their own lines; seasons turn; standing
in his summer hut
all night grasshoppers churn their tune
Basho writes by the harvest moon’s
light; then
not standing still but turning
on highest mountain top he sees
the red carp sun straddle
east and west   turning to catch
its either light standing
in Fuji’s red snow while tiny boats
drift below; when the snows melt turning
his muddy feet to riverbanks / plum blossoms
turning in the warm breezes light
with spring, Basho not answering
the call to another cup of plum
wine Basho stands unsteady in a tiny boat,
turns it to moon’s broad reflection on the pond
leaning over to kiss it and he’s gone

published in Poet & Critic
Vol. XIII, No. 3   1982

Almost Fruit by Maja Trochimczyk

Sweet are the Uses of Adversity

            
             Sweet are the uses of adversity
            Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
            Wears yet a precious jewel in its head.
                                                -- William Shakespeare

Sweet are the uses of adversity — the office
culture I have grown around, the
strategic plan, draft document, political
message meant to motivate — a skill,
a skein of words I have grown
as an appendage, developed skin around.

Sweet are the uses of adversity — provide
Jesuit, Franciscan, community, university:
the education I had to my children.

Sweet are the uses of adversity — the mate
for twenty years, a skein
of months, laughter, jokes, sorrow, bitterness between us and I
have pits and fissures and blooms and growth
I’ve grown skin around to stay.

Sweet are the uses of adversity: the modern
whizz, car chase, crammed calendar, lack of peace, the pace
a price to pay for all we have — far from want, we will not starve.

Sweet are the uses of adversity as used
by the hopeful who alit
at Jamestown, Plymouth, any yard
where they planted food and buried
their young, their many dead. A certain determination
swelled; they stayed. And I
— another pair of hands, another hauler
of the great barge forward —
see the head of land, hear sloshing waves,
know my part of the coarse, warty flesh, intent
on that jewel glint.

published in Agenda
Vol. 41. Nos. 3-4 (double issue)
Winter 2005

 

Speed of Light, by Maja Trochimczyk

 

One Face May Hide Another
                                            after Kenneth Koch

 
I wait at least a moment
and see what is already there
as at a crossing
when one brindle bulldog
may hide another
while evening cools the air
and though one can scarcely believe
in a creature so preposterous,
yet when the light changes
there is another that appears
when their leashes split
from a single hand, and if I wait
I’ll surely see the other holding
a cell phone, for no walker
is disengaged, as at a stoplight
when one looks left to see
what one expects, the next
driver with a cell phone, but sees
instead a brindle bulldog
on the driver’s lap, a second
bulldog in the back, the driver
searching for her cell phone. Now looking up
one scouts around to see
if the streets aren’t full of brindle bulldogs
but finds instead they’re full
of people dressed in slim black pants
who haunt the sidewalks, step
in and out of cars. Some
have cell phones, some
red hair. One recedes
in her red sandals, the undersides
wink at me with each step: red,
white sole, red – then one’s
a red dot on a parrot’s cheek
and another parrot shrieks
as they hurtle, gadflies, tree to tree
and I look at least a moment, see
red flowers in the flame trees
which then take flight as parrots’ cheeks
receding with each flap, dodging
people on the streets
dressed in slim black pants. And one
is your friend, one is mine, and one
holds a cell phone or two
leashes in one hand. And though
I thought I saw you once before
it was instead
someone who resembled you and paused
and stroked her chin just to consider
if I was her cousin or her cousin’s friend
or simply looked like her –-
then drove away
with brindle bulldogs.  

FEATURED ARTIST - SANDY FISHER ON MAY 26, 2019

We are asking poets to write poems to eight paintings by Sandy Fisher, more information about her will be posted later, here are just the paintings to view and write about. 

Awaiting Monet

Autumn Ablaze

Break of Day at Big Rock Creek

Golden Hour in Owens Valley

Where the Road Bends

Springdale Sunset on Johnson Mountain

 Quiet Harbor

Sweet Whisper

PHOTOS FROM THE READING BY PEGGY DOBREER 

AND MANDY KAHN ON MARCH 24, 2029

Mandy Kahn and Peggy Dobreer

Maja Trochimczyk, Mandy Kahn, Peggy Dobreer

Kathabela and Rick Wilson

Kathabela and Rick Wilson

Peggy Dobreer

Seated L to R: Marlene Hitt, Mira Mataric, Mandy Kahn, Peggy Dobreer, Kathabela Wilson

Standing L to R: Dorothy Skiles, NN, PAm Shea, Peter Larsen, Maja Trochimczyk, Lois P. Jones, NN, Seven Dhar, Rick Wilson

Peggy Dobreer and Mandy Kahn at Village Poets on Sunday March 24, 2019

Big Tujunga Wash, February 2019, Photo by Maja Trochimczyk

Village Poets of Sunland Tujunga present Peggy Dobreer and Mandy Kahn as Featured Poets on Sunday, September 25, 2016 at 4:30 p.m. at Bolton Hall Museum (10110 Commerce Avenue, Tujunga, CA 91042). The reading will feature two Open Mike segments and refreshments. We will pass around the  hat of George Harris, the builder of Bolton  Hall Museum, Los Angeles Historic Monument no. 2 (from 1913), for voluntary donations of $3 per person. 

PEGGY DOBREER 

Peggy Dobreer won Downey Symphony Orchestra’s, Poetry Matters 2016 Contest.  She has one pushcart nomination from Cadence Collective, and two books with Moon Tide Press: Drop & Dazzle and In the Lake of Your Bones. Peggy is featured in the first Aeolian Harp Folio Series by Glass Lyre Press and has been published in Cultural Weekly, The Rise Up Review, Pirene’s Fountain, For the Love of Words, Mas Tequilla Press, Malpais Review, and LA Yoga Magazine among others. 

Peggy is a longtime educator and former dancer, who taught with Red Hen Press for Writing in the Schools, and was a Program Director for AROHO2015, A Rom of Her Own Foundation. She has curated and promoted other poets at venues in LA for 15 years. Visit her at www.peggydobreer.com.

Calla lily leaf, by Maja Trochimczyk

Exquisite Harmonics

What is exquisite

            is the breaking of china

                        splash against tile

            bright tones of glass

What is exquisite

            is the tango of Kali

                        The savory statement

            of unsung stanzas

The brain quenching

                        fire of mouths

Migration of the herd

            to the gate of the mind

                        Throne of the flesh

                                    that lights up the eye

                                                Arc of the rib to

                                                            the bone in the soup

What is exquisite

            is a memoir of the body

                        A vibratory tonic of

            connective harmonics

guiding chants that

                                                cannot be extinguished

What is exquisite

            is this limitless unleadening

                        alchemy of Ganesh on our sleeves

In the breath

            of the opening cage

                        the rush to rhapsody’s rest

                                    in the eyes of the hawk

                                                on the wings of a loon

                                                            who light this way and

                                                                        fill these forests with sound                    

  (C) by Peggy Dobreer

MANDY KAHN

Mandy Kahn

Mandy Kahn is the author of two poetry collections, Glenn Gould’s Chair and Math, Heaven, Time. Her poetry is included in The Best American Poetry 2018 from Scribner/Simon & Schuster and was featured in former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s newspaper column American Life in Poetry. She’s given readings at Cambridge University, London Review Bookshop and Shoreditch House in England, at Motto in Berlin, at Colette in Paris, at Printed Matter in New York, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and at many venues in Southern California, and has been interviewed by BBC Radio, Flaunt and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She frequently collaborates with composers to create new works that combine verse and classical music and was a librettist for Yuval Sharon’s immersive opera Hopscotch. 


THE EVERYDAY

Old friends, old loves, I celebrate
the day-to-day you’ve found: the favored cup,
the dog, the child, the husband, wife—
the hat rack by the door, the bowl of keys,
the chair in sun,
weekends with your omelets made
just right. You graduated into
the encyclopedic pleasures of the everyday,
that brighter vision—
the sharp phantasmagoria you enter
when you watch your child through sprinkler water:
that moving prism.

Didn’t I always tell you, lover, roommate,
there were portals by the dishtowels?
          
                                    You think you left your dreams.

You’ve entered
the Basilica of the Present
by its common causeway.

This, your striving earned.

Pier in Hermosa Beach, by Maja Trochimczyk

The Tour Guide

I followed the German tour guide

through the hulking old basilica.

He told the group (or so I guessed),

indicating high and low:

This is where the wind begins.

This is where the childhoods of a thousand

martyrs live, untouched.

Wood grain in these pews still curls

to likenesses of patron saints.

Window-holes are cut the breadth

of human souls, when loosed.

Dark paint in the frescoes is crushed ants.

White paint is light.

Leaves and fauna long extinct are rendered

in the porticoes. See that goat

with antlers? Gone from life,

but captured here.

(Hold your breath and it bows its head.)

(Reach towards the ceiling and sigh, and it sighs.)

Worth two times the value of the Bulgar Sea

is that old bell.

(When younger priests

would ring it,

the nuns were warned to shield their hearts.)

He said far more

I can’t recall

and when I tried to pay him,

he spurned my coins, saying, in German,

What good is money,

my child, to the wind?

Pacific Ocean with LA seen from Hermosa Beach, Maja Trochimczyk

VILLAGE POETS NEWS

VILLAGE POETS ANTHOLOGY

In 2020, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Village Poets Readings, Moonrise Press will issue a Village Poets Anthology, with poems by featured poets - and regular attendees of the readings over the past ten years. Please submit your poems and bios on moonrisepress website - or via email in one attachment with three poems (one will be selected) and a 150 to 200 word biographical notes.  

Email to maja@moonrisepress.com.  Submission deadline - August 31, 2019.

Due to large number of contributors, the anthology will be available for sale to contributors of one poem each at heavily discounted price of $10. An eBook will also be made. 

TOTI O'BRIEN FEATURE IN FEBRUARY 2019

L to R, standing: Maja Trochimczyk, Joe DeCenzo, Dan Krosser, Marlene Hitt, Pauli Dutton, Pete Larsen, Rick Wilson, Rick Dutton, Mari Werner, Sharon Hawley with issue of Colorado Boulevard with an article by Toti. Seated L to R: Pam Shea, Kathabela Wilson, Toti O'Brien, Joyce Futa, Mary Torregrosa.

L to R, standing: Maja Trochimczyk, Joe DeCenzo, Dan Krosser, Marlene Hitt, Pauli Dutton, Pete Larsen, Rick Wilson, Rick Dutton, Mari Werner, Sharon Hawley with issue of Colorado Boulevard with an article by Toti. Seated L to R: Pam Shea, Kathabela Wilson, Toti O'Brien, Joyce Futa, Mary Torregrosa.

During the reading, Maja Trochimczyk presented the California Quarterly vol. 44 no. 4 edited by Margaret Saine including her poem, "Oh, the Art of Looking."  Trochimczyk then encouraged poets to submit their work to the CQ via the website of the California State Poetry Society. Dr. Trochimczyk has just been elected the new Acting President of the CSPS.  The Society organizes monthly poetry contests, annual poetry contests, and publishes the California Quarterly, edited by eight California poets, each with a different voice, priorities and interests.  This makes the journal vibrant and relevant.

https://www.californiastatepoetrysociety.org/

The same group with Dorothy Skiles on the left, and Alice Pero next to Marlene.