Zounds!!
There were 50 seats in Rm #1857, and I believe we filled them all! We had ten fine open readers whose poetry spanned the range from comical to sublime, gritty to romantic, deeply personal to universal. We even had an open reading "virgin" who graced us with two of her poems.
We were honored by the presence of Michael C. Ford, a Grammy nominated recording artist, Pulitzer Prize nominated poet, playwright, literary judge & panelist, educator, essayist, and leading light of the Los Angeles poetry community (http://www.cinetropic.com/ford/)
We were also honored by the presence of several fine local poets including Gail Wronsky, Joan Bauer, Rafael F. J. Alvarado, and others who I am forgetting or am yet unaware of due to the sheer magnitude of the poetry community in what is supposedly the cultural wasteland of LA. (Hey New York! We got poetry AND In-And-Out. All you got is saxophones.)
Our featured poets were brilliant. I had been reading the poetry of Drs. Cushing and Gale before tonight's reading and found both to be beautiful and compelling in their own unique ways. Still, I was surprised at how their performances made their poems come even more alive: wittier, sharper, more moving, and more telling. They were on their game, and we just sat back and enjoyed every minute.
Our next reading will be March 8 featuring the inimitable poetry of James Ragan. We hope to see you then!
Also please remember:
- Sign-up for LMU Extension courses: http://www.lmu.edu/academics/extension/programs.htm
- Buy books at Kate's Red Hen Press: redhen.org
- Buy more books at James's Cahuenga Press: http://www.cahuengapress.com/
- Bring your English and/or Spanish poems to the Latin American Poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque every Monday at 7pm
- Join Poet-to-Poet Meetup (especially for those in the Long Beach area) at: http://www.meetup.com/poetsreading/
David Slavin
LMU Extension Poetry Series
The LMU Extension Poetry Series takes place on select Thursday nights at 8pm in Room #1857 of University Hall at 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045. Park free in P2-P3 and turn left as you enter the underground parking area. Take the middle set of elevators to G level (elevator room #2). As soon as you exit the elevator take an immediate right through the silver doors and curl around behind the elevators, look for posted signage.
(if you go into the Atrium, you have gone too far). There is a limited Open Reading. Sign-ups at 7:45 (5 minutes or two poems).
James Cushing, is Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo for 2008-2010. Formerly the director of the Al’s Bar Poetry Series and host of a live poetry program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Cushing has published poetry and criticism in Antioch Review, Barnwood, Denver Quarterly, as well as dozens of other journals since 1979. Cahuenga Press has published three previous collections: You and the Night and the Music (1991, o.p.), The Length of an Afternoon (1999) and Undercurrent Blues (2005). W.S. Merwin has praised his poetry’s “evident intelligence, and depth and maturity,” while Amy Gerstler has noted that “Cushing infuses his shifting, surreal vision with undercurrents of deep feeling.” Cushing teaches literature and creative writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he also hosts a weekly jazz program on KCPR-FM, the college radio station in San Luis Obispo.
Dancing in the Dark
We know now that colors are part of the dreaming,
That control is the name on the most vivid one.
Under glass, we learn the ease of flight,
The pleasure of repetition: the whole academy
Seen as a salad of cool, moving vegetables.
The truth
(The kind that no longer hurts) wearied us, redlined our desire
For the whole truth, the mixed bag of candy and IOUs
Thrown from the train ringing past daily at 11:26.
Pick them up, won't you? she gestured. Surrounding buildings
Got ready to crumble any moment. She repeated the gesture,
Got famous nationwide for bringing it with her
When she took the stage, pelted with camellias but
Nonetheless afraid. We stay up all night afterwards
To see stars move and rumble like sperm cells. Neither of us
Admits or accuses, neither of us needs to move. -j.cushing
Kate Gale, poet, writer, essayist and opera librettist, received her Ph.D. in American and English Literature from Claremont Graduate University. She is on the judging committee of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and is the managing editor of Red Hen Press. She is also the editor of The Los Angeles Review, president of the American Composers Forum–Los Angeles, past president of PEN USA, and serves on the boards of the A Room of Her Own Foundation and the Poetry Society of America. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently Mating Season (Tupelo Press), an autobiographical novel titled Lake of Fire, and a bilingual children’s book. She is also the editor of several anthologies of fiction and non-fiction. As a librettist, she co-authored Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Andrew Taylor and wrote Río de Sangre, an original opera, with composer Don Davis. She has two forthcoming collections of poetry, The Goldilocks Zone (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012) and Echo Light (Blaze Vox, 2012).
Double Journey
A double journey conscious seeing.
Open faced dreaming.
The sky undressed to the ankles.
Down came the hair, the blouse, the skirt.
In pictures, I look like a round apple.
Are you a part-time waitress?
I’m not part-time anything.
Everything I do is full time.
Mostly, I’m a full time flounder.
Floundering through my life.
It was all a rage of white-washed memory.
It was all a lie. The light is fading.
There are no trees in the house.
We put them in the backyard.
The outside creeps them out, the trees.
The trees would like the sky
to themselves, their phallic tips
into all that blue white cloudscape.
If you have your way with the sky,
the orgasm is enormous.
It was all open faced dreaming. In pictures
I looked like a nomad with a round belly.
Brown face and legs, everything else very pale
.
There’s blue rising and underneath a round table.
The pillars no longer hold up the sky.
It must float unfastened from the air.
The round table seats eight who came down
from the boat with camels. Why not just sky?
There are no birds. Only cockroaches. Chickens.
The last table. The last sky. -k.gale