Village Poets Welcomes Two Celebrated Poets in February
Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga is delighted to invite
poets and friends of poetry to our monthly reading held in person, on the 4th Sunday,
Feb 25, 2024 at 4:30 pm. at Bolton Hall Museum, located at 10110 Commerce Ave,
Tujunga, Los Angeles, CA 91042-2313
In February we are honored to have internationally celebrated
poet, James Ragan, as well widely
acknowledged poet, Amy Gerstler for
this special reading. Come celebrate the month of love with two amazing writers
and join in the open reading or just come to listen.
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, a Los
Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.
Appearing
in 36 anthologies and 15 languages, James
Ragan is an internationally recognized author of 10 books of poetry,
including The Hunger Wall and The Chanter’s
Reed, and 3 plays staged in the U.S, Moscow, Beijing, Athens etc. With
poems in Poetry, The Nation, World Lit
Today etc, he has read at the U.N, Carnegie Hall, for CNN, NPR, PBS, BBC
and 7 Heads of State including Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev. Honors
include 2 Litt.D’s, 2 Fulbright Professorships, an NEA Grant, Emerson Poetry
Prize, 9 Pushcart Prize nominations, Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, a
Poetry Society of America citation, finalist for the Walt Whitman Book Award,
London’s Troubadour Int. Poetry Prize, etc. He’s the subject of the Arina Films
documentary, Flowers and Roots, awarded
17 Int. Film Festival recognitions, and Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film
Festival. He directed USC’s Professional Writing Program (25 yrs), served as
Poet-in-Residence at Cal Tech (3 yrs) and 26 summers as Dist. Professor of
Poetry at Prague’s Charles U. Czech President Vaclav Havel honored him as “Ambassador of the Arts” at the 1994 World PEN
Congress. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney praises his poems for “sparing no
passion in believing they sing,” and Nobel nominee Miroslav Holub lauds his
“domination of the art of poetic narration with insight that marks major
poets.”
Poems by James
Ragan
The River in the Tree
In the
hollow where the dark spits up
cat’s
teeth in white and alder green,
I hear
the wind click down along the willow spars
like
crackling leaves in chimney fire,
and know
the river in the tree.
It is
May always and the same willow
sprays
its haunt of lilacs down the watercourse.
All
month the dozers sweep the hillside up
and toss
it down in puddles. It is said
the
stream is swamp and old for rooting.
In sleep
I hear its false voice calling
like the
dance of air when the crickets sing.
All
night the swish slag pours into my ear,
and
sparks of evergreen and potato pokes
drip in
mud pouched like melting butter.
Above
the iris path I hear the quiet passing
of the
swing rope slicked by finger oil.
With
bony child’s feet I served the sky
and
leaped for the greater good
to the
solid slag of the city side.
I know
the past needs leaving like the river
my body
makes to root all grounding leaves.
Today my
neighbor tilts his finger to the air,
and
praising axe handles, fells the windless willow.
It lies
old for rotting, the good for nothing.
from
Womb-Weary, Carol Publ. 1990, Finalist,
Walt Whitman Center Book Award 1987
The Pacific
Its mind
has from the little bark of thinking
created
the whale, a water tree, a floating
paradox.
The ocean seems to believe there is no shore
worthy
of thought and beyond the thought no memory.
It has
seen the otter’s sand diminished, the sea mews tarred,
the
mountain space above the beach a swale of fire
burled
out of poppies or the greens of weed and kelp
as if
persistence by a larger will were reigning,
as if
from whales a long thick oak were being carved.
From any
distance where the rower steers the waves
away
from ground, a reflection enters, breaks apart,
and on
the stirruped shafts of light, a whale dives up
to
branch the shores of memory extinguished in our hearts.
from The Hunger Wall Grove Press, 1995
Motherskin
to a Slovak mother
Born of
wheat root and summer rusk,
born of
rain, sheened gold as hair swirled
in the
soft comb you rake and truss,
you
delight in a mirror or photograph
or the
touch of any son. When you bale
bread
one by one with prayer hands,
the heart
of hair on every child’s arm lingers.
You
blush at a wedding dance
and love
counting fingers
when I
play the boy and promise to die young.
All day
in the shadow wood of the green martyr,
you
kneel, your babushka slung
high
across your shoulders. You can never die.
The
earth would cease to grow and only know water.
The
shale beneath the house has claimed your hair
possessively,
the way spring water fawns moss
for
breath or the wash of fresh air,
the way
childskin seeks a bed to smoothly lie across.
Published
in the Los Angeles Times on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1989., From
Womb-Weary, Carol Publ. 1990
If For Each of Us
a rope
could swing us
long and
light across a widening trough
of all
that fails us in our lives,
I would
want to land upon the Isle of Echo,
lush
with repetition, green with being
original
in birth and twice the twin
a wave
might dance along the skerry.
I would
want a canyon tall for hawks to carry
long the
deep tattoo of voices on the air.
I would
want an ear to hear
what
words to read again to memory,
what
verse to carol, thoughts to root
before
the sparrow’s flight the mind has taken
comes to
rest on truth. I would want
to hear
a vowel repeat in consonance
with
alliteration’s frothy throat.
And
should the landing fail its footing,
I would
want to know what inspiration
in
shorter flight one syllable might repeat
as in
the swash the flat-stone makes
to skip
across the light in water
or the
voice a wind gives to birch and linden.
I would
want the distance to all understanding
to
narrow just enough to fail at failure.
I would
want a melody of chances
to learn
to love again what first I dreamed,
free as
wonder, soft as touch,
and of
all things simple
to care
again for them as much.
from
Too Long a Solitude, Oklahoma
University Press, 2009. Finalist,
Oklahoma Book Award 2010) originally
appeared in Poetry Magazine Pushcart
Poetry Prize Nomination, 2005
© 2024 James Ragan
Amy
Gerstler's most recent book of poems is Index
of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). Her work has appeared in a variety
of magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker and Paris
Review. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor, and arranger
Steve Gunderson on a musical. Her previous books of poems include Scattered
at Sea, Dearest Creature, Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, Nerve
Storm, and Bitter Angel. In 2019, she received a Foundation for
Contemporary Arts CD Wright Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New
York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times
Book Prize in Poetry. Her book of poems Bitter Angel won a National Book
Critics Circle Award. In addition to poetry she also writes fiction,
nonfiction, plays, journalism and art criticism.
Poems by Amy Gerstler
Ode to the Pillow
Must a
pillow, that cushiony head-welcomer, always concede to our cheeks? Can it nurse
no higher ambition than to impersonate a marshmallow? Might a pillow never
stand up for itself? Does it possess no intrinsic personality? Must it shun
sharpness, remain nothing but slump and mush, never displaying its anger or will?
The sad fact seems to be that for all its virtues the pillow lacks backbone. Smooth
and cool to the touch, clad in a fresh pillow slip, my pillow for tonight exhales
a whiff of the steam iron's disciplinary rigor, but transformed, its cotton sweetening
the iron's hot metal breath---the breath of a prison matron--into something
more like the breath of a meadow. A shock absorber, a pillow is more forgiving
than a priest (much is spilled onto it: think dream leakage.) And a pillow
functions well as a confessional. The sick and the helpless may be buoyed up,
as if by a life raft, in clinging to their pillow, or they may be smothered with
one into a final goodnight. Like the uncomplaining potato, the pillow is willing
to take shape according to people's needs, enduring mashing after mashing. Pillows
have no sense of their own splendor. Employed as ineffectual weapon a pillow
can of course burst and snow feathers, drizzle fluff or rain buckwheat husks...and
herein lies the pillow's mysterious connection to weather. It's believed
pillows subsist on a diet of fog and cloud, though no one has ever seen them
eat.
Published in
“DMQ Review”
Siren
I have a fish’s tail, so I’m not qualified to love you.
But I do. Pale as an August sky, pale as flour
milled
a thousand times, pale as the icebergs I have
never seen,
and twice as numb–my skin is such a contrast to
the rough
rocks I lie on, that from far away it looks like
I’m a baby
riding a dinosaur. The turn of centuries or the
turn
of a page means the same to me, little or nothing.
I have teeth in places you’d never suspect.
Come. Kiss me
and die soon. I slap my tail in the
shallows–which is to say
I appreciate nature. You see my sisters and me
perched
on rocks and tiny island here and there for
miles:
untangling our hair with our fingers, eating
seaweed.
Published in
Bitter Angel (North Point Press & Carnegie Mellon Press)
The Cure
Doing
fantastic, thanks for asking! I just chugged
a glass
of dinosaur urine and feel new-baptized!
If
you're ever lucky enough get your hands
on a
quart of this stuff don't be squeamish.
It makes
penicillin seem like skim milk!
No virus
can slay you with dino piss in your system.
Last
night I participated in the 8 pm scream-out
again.
For a quarter of an hour the two halves
of my
neighborhood yell as loud as they can
across
our little canyon to prove to ourselves
as well
as the folks we can't see anymore
that
we're still kicking after nine months
of
pandemic lockdown. Now my throat feels
strip-mined,
but I'm glad cause my sense
of
connection got fed--not a whole meal,
just a
handful of crumbs--but hey, that's way
better
than nothing. After yesterday evening's
hoot and
holler session, a dude on the far side
of the
ravine lugged a pair of ginormous speakers
up to
his roof and blasted excerpts from two
of Dr.
King's famous sermons, plus some lines
from a
Cesar Chavez speech I could understand
only
half of because alas my Spanish is not what I
might
wish. Then he proceeded to DJ a weirdass
menu of
songs, so loud the balcony was quaking
under my
feet, ranging from "Stayin' Alive" by
the
squeaky-voiced Bee Gees (who do sound like
insects)
to Aretha Franklin belting "Chain of Fools"
(a
comment on the hopefully outgoing government,
was my
guess). Joan Baez sang "We Shall Overcome"
in her
reedy soprano. Then Aretha again with
"Amazing
Grace." When realized I could actually
see the
ant-sized guy responsible for curating
this
spoken-word-and-song broadcast from across
the
arroyo, shirtless on his roof with a quartet
of
friends, I admit I cried a little bit. Then I went
back
inside and downed another mug of sauropod
pee.
It's a lovely amber color, with notes of gingko,
horsetail and fern. That drink sure
has kept me
going during this dark time.
Published in
“Court Green”
© 2024 Amy Gerstler