February - CELEBRATE LOVE MONTH with new anthology titled ...and love...

   

Friday, February 1, 7:00 pm

Pomegranate Books, 4418 Park Ave., Wilmington

Chocolate, wine, music, and poetry—pre-Valentines celebration of the …and love…. anthology, edited by Richard Krawiec, Debra Kaufman, Allison Elrod. Poems about lovers and spouses. Sons and daughters. Parents, friends, strangers, pets. First love, last love, dying love, passionate love, sad love, wasted love, devoted love; love of body, love of spirit, love of self, love of place, love of time, love of moments, love of love. Related events will be held:

• Sunday, February 3, The Arts Center, 300 E. Main St., Carrboro

• Saturday, February 9, 2:00 pm, Barnes & Noble, Northline Dr. (Friendly Shopping Center), Greensboro, followed by a workshop and an Open Mic

Want to buy the book?

...and love.... Edited by Richard Krawiec, 

Allison Elrod, and Debra Kaufman

Jacar Press
$15.95, paperback

Available from the publisher click

Poems by Marge Piercy, Sam Hamill, 

Dorianne Laux, Ron Rash, Lola Haskins, 

Stuart Dischell, Doris Davenport, 

Fred Chappell, Kathryn Stripling Byer, 

Alan Michael Parker, Michael Chitwood, 

Betty Adcock, Joe Millar, Nancy Simpson, 

David Huddle, Holly Iglesias, Dannye 

Romine Powell, and 100+ other poets.

Jacar Press website: www.jacarpress.com.

NORTH CAROLINA WRITERS' NETWORK WEST

Hello Poets, Writers, and Friends,

Yes, I am still connected to NC Writers Network West, still a consultant. I strongly recommend their programs for writers living in the far western NC mountains, where there are literally no other on-going programs for writers.  These three programs featuring writers reading their work are free and open to the public. This is one way to meet other writers and a way to introduce yourself and learn more about NCWN West and our programs.

In February, three  programs you will want to attend are (1) COFFEE WITH THE POETS which presents one featured poet per month, with an open mic for all and ( 2) WRITERS NIGHT OUT that features one poet each month with an open mic for all and (3) POETS AND WRITERS READING POEMS AND STORIES  at John C. Campbell Folk School which features two readers, often one poet and one fiction writer who are publishing authors and members of NCWN West. --Nancy Simpson

HERE'S THIS MONTH'S LINE UP

You don't want to miss Bob Groves, featured reader this month at Coffee with the Poets.
Come early to get a good seat. Cafe Touche, 82 Main Street, Hayesville, NC
Open mic follows Bob's reading. Bring something to read, a poem or short prose piece.

Put the date on your calendar now. Wednesday, Feb. 8, 10:30 a.m.

We look forward to seeing everyone again.See you there,
Founder of Coffee With the Poets, Glenda Beall


Here's the press release with information on the poet reading at the next Writers' Night Out Feb 10. Hope to see you there. He does a fun and intelligent reading. --Karen Holmes

“GEORGIA AUTHOR OF THE YEAR” NOMINEE TO READ IN HIAWASSEE

FEB 1, 2012 – Atlanta poet Rupert Fike will be the featured reader at Writers’ Night Out at Mountain Perk Coffee House in Hiawassee on Friday, February 10 at 7 p.m.  Audience members can also participate in an open microphone if they’d like to share their own poetry or prose. This is a free monthly event for people who love the written and spoken word.

Fike’s collection, Lotus Buffet (Brick Road Poetry Press), has earned him a nomination for Georgia Author of the Year 2011 in poetry. Two of the poems in the book have also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Writer Barbara Hamby says, “What happens when you cross a Southern raconteur with a Buddhist monk? You get Rupert Fike’s exhilarating poems.” His work has been published in Rosebud, The Georgetown Review, Natural Bridge, The Atlanta Review, The Cortland Review, storySouth, The Blue Fifth Review and others. He has a poem inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza, and his non-fiction work, Voices from The Farm, accounts of life on a spiritual community in the 1970s, is now available in paperback.  

 Writers’ Night Out takes place on the second Friday of each month and is open to the public. The event draws approximately 30 people from four counties. Mountain Perk Coffee House is located at 1390 Highway 76 East in Chatuge Harbor Plaza across from Towns County High School. Food, gourmet coffees and other refreshments are available for purchase. Each open microphone reader can sign up at the door and has two-and-a-half minutes to read.

            For more information, please contact Karen Holmes at (404) 316-8466 or kpaulholmes@gmail.com, or call Mountain Perk at (706) 896-0504.

Poets Glenda Barrett and Mary Ricketson will read their original poems at John C. Campbell Folk School.

POETS AND WRITERS READING POEMS AND STORIES 7:00 p.m. at John C. Campbell 

Folk School on Feb.16th are two of the best you will hear, both authors with books in print: Mary Ricketson of Hanging Dog, NC ,  author of I Heard the River Call My Name  and Glenda Barrett of Hiawassee, Georgia, author of When the Sap Rises. Contact Program Coordinator Linda Smith
(828) 389-9849.

NC WRITERS NETWORK WEST  also offers to members only, two writing critique groups that meet once a month at Tri County Community College, one for poets and one for prose writers.  

BEST BOOK TO BUY FOR THE TEACHER ON YOUR GIFT LIST

Solo Cafe Issues 8 & 9: Teachers & Students

Solo Press

Publisher, Glenna Luschei

Guest Editor, Lenard D. Moore

CONTRIBUTORS:

Laura Boss * John Bradley * Earl Sherman Braggs * Sally Buckner * George Burns * Mary Ann Cain * Alvaro Cardona-Hine * Kelly Cherry * Joseph Gastiger * Ray Gonzalez * Michael S. Harper * Shayla Hawkins * George Kalamaras * Patrick Lawler * Carol Lem * Gerald Locklin * Perie Longo * Kevin Lucia * Teddy Macker * * Michael McFee * Karen McKinnon * Maria Melendez * Susan Meyers * Lenard D. Moore * Terre Ouwehand * Randy W. Pait * David Rigsbee * Nancy Simpson * Barry Spacks * Shelby Stephenson * Lamont Steptoe * Gina Streaty * John Tritica * Jerry W. Ward, Jr. * Bruce Weigl * Mel Weisburd * Jackson Wheeler * Carolyn Beard Whitlow 

Congratulations to the editors of Solo Cafe on the publication of this new double issue of poems, essays, and reviews pertaining to the theme of teachers and students. 


Copies of the journal are available through Solo Press at this address: Solo Press, 5146 Foothill Road, Carpinteria, CA 93013 or berrypress@aol.com.

copied from post Posted by Susan Meyers 

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2010

Best Buy for Literate Person on your List --NOT A COOK BOOK but filled with delicious soul food

 DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Southern Poetry Review has been so much a part of so many poets' lives over the past 50 years that it's hard to imagine the universe without it. When I was a student in the MFA program at UNC-G in the '60s, I was introduced to the journal and to its founder Guy Owen. Owen was an instructor in the program for one semester while I was there.

After his death, SPR, as we called it, moved to Charlotte for several years and then down to Savannah's Armstrong Atlantic State University, where a friend of mine and native western North Carolinian, James Smith, became Associate editor. Now, as editor of the new anthology Don't Leave Hungry, celebrating 50 years of Southern Poetry Review, he gathers this peripatetic history together in his masterful introduction. His first paragraph makes Owen's commitment to poetry, and SPR's ongoing adherence to it, clear: In many journals, and certainly in major magazines that bother at all, as Owen notes, poems are “filler,” not “the main course.” A Journal Dedicated to Poetry: that’s the logo the current editors gave SPR, and we like to think its founder would approve. For us, talking about Guy Owen is a way of talking about Southern Poetry Review.

No doubt about it, DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry review, recently published by the University of Arkansas Press, makes an immediate impression on anyone who comes within a few feet of the book. Its cover design is composed of a Mark Rothko painting, Untitled, from 1953, Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Its title, too, surprises the eye. This is a poetry anthology? Not a cookbook? When you read the title poem, by Eleanor Ross Taylor, you will understand that this anthology offers nothing less than an invitation to feast on the art of poetry. James Smith, again, from his Introduction: Our anthology’s title derives from a poem in it by Eleanor Ross Taylor, a southern poet undervalued for years. I was delighted to find “Don’t Leave Hungry” as I read through SPR’s archives, selecting poems for this book. Not only is it strange and marvelous (that word again!) in its own right, but its commanding title has a “southern” ring to it that would satisfy Owen. Taylor’s niece, Heather Ross Miller, also in the anthology and a former staff member, described Owen as “always encouraging us and welcoming us toward that table where so many crowd and so few get fed.” Miller speaks of writers here and their desire for publication, but Owen also offered his journal as a table where he hoped readers would crowd and find plenty to feed them, no needto leave hungry.


(Eleanor Ross Taylor)

What else by way of enticement? Well, there's a foreword by Billy Collins. And dust jacket testimonials by Jane Hirschfield and Lee Smith, who says "No reader will leave this harvest table hungry--here is nourishment for all. ...These poems epitomize their eras yet move beyond, rise beyond as poetry always does, capturing time and place and lived life in a way no other art can manage."

And now for the "main course," as Guy Owen called them, arranged and introduced by decade, with Smith's usual clarity of style and presentation! As the dust jacket notes, this anthology "charts the development of this influential journal decade by decade, making clear that although it has close ties to a particular region, it has consistently maintained a national scope, publishing poets from all over the United States. SPR’s goal has been to celebrate the poem above all, so although there are poems by major poets here, there are many gems by less famous, perhaps even obscure, writers too. Here are 183 poems by nearly as many poets, from A. R. Ammons, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Mark Doty, Claudia Emerson, David Ignatow, and Carolyn Kizer to Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, and Charles Wright."

But wait--why rush through a feast? In this first week of National Poetry Month, let's sit back and anticipate what waits for us tomorrow, several poems from this beautiful and generous anthology. And because these few poems I offer will, I hope, serve to whet the appetite for more, here is the publication information and a link to the University of Arkansas Press. (Copied article written by Kathryn Stripling Byer April 1, 2009.) 

Want to buy a copy? click on University of Arkansas Press URL

http://www.uapress.com/titles/sp09/smith-dlh.html

GIFT BOOK FOR THE BIRD LOVER ON YOUR Gift LIST

The Poets Guide To The Birds

edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser

The painter, Walter Inglis Anderson, once said that birds are the holes in the sky through which we can see God, and I think that many of us look upon birds with the kind of awe and wonder Anderson's statement suggests. And, sometimes, poems about birds are better than seeing the birds themselves. Judith Kitchen and I, like enthusiastic birdwatchers, here point our fingers toward poems that might otherwise go unnoticed amidst the dense foliage of contemporary poetry. We hope our readers will enjoy this book just half as much as if they'd actually seen all the birds these poems represent.

— Ted Kooser

Janice Townley Moore reading 
from POETS GUIDE TO THE BIRDS
at Coffee With the Poets 
in Hayesville,NC, March 2009.

Visit the Anhinga Press website to read an introduction or to buy the book.
An anthology of poems. . . A dissimulation of birds

Poems by...

Betty Adcock, Kim Addonizio, Sandra Alcosser, Pamela Alexander, Linda Allardt, Christianne Balk, Rick Barot, Bruce Bennett, Boyd Benson, Wendell Berry, Linda Bierds, David Biespiel, Wendy Bishop, Ralph Black, Bruce Bond, Philip Booth, Marianne Boruch, David Bottoms, John Brehm, Geoffrey Brock, Van K. Brock, Fleda Brown, Rick Campbell, Hayden Carruth, Robert Cording, Stephen Corey, Deborah Cummins, Robert Dana, Philip Deaver, Madeline DeFrees, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Wayne Dodd, Stephen Dunn, John Engels, David Allan Evans, Amy Fleury, Richard Foerster, Chris Forhan, Erica Funkhouser, Tess Gallagher, Brendan Galvin, George Garrett, Frank Gaspar, Dan Gerber, Nancy Geyer, Kevin Goodan, Sally Green, Samuel Green, Jonathan Greene, Eamon Grennan, Pamela Gross, John Haines, Barbara Hamby, Michael S. Harper, Jeffrey Harrison, Jim Harrison, Lola Haskins, Robert Hedin, William Heyen, Jane Hirshfield, Jonathan Holden, David Huddle, Holly Hughes, Harry Humes, M.J. Iuppa, Gray Jacobik, Eve Joseph, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Robert Kinsley, Patricia Kirkpatrick, William Kloefkorn, C.L. Knight, Ted Kooser, Stephen Kuusisto, Steve Lautermilch, Donna Long, Denise Low, Peter Makuck, Jeff Daniel Marion, Dionisio Martinez, Dan Masterson, Jo McDougall, James McKean, Molly McQuade, W.S. Merwin, Lawrence Millman, Judson Mitcham, Janice Townley Moore, Jim Moore, Robert Morgan, Leonard Nathan, Duane Niatum, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ed Ochester, Carole Oles, William Olsen, Eric Pankey, Linda Pastan, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Jim Peterson, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, John Poch, Joshua Poteat, Lawrence Raab, Keith Ratzlaff, James Richardson, Pattiann Rogers, Stan Sanvel Rubin, Marjorie Saiser, Peter Schmitt, Grace Schulman, Gary Short, Peggy Shumaker, Charles Simic, Nancy Simpson, R.T. Smith, William Jay Smith, Barry Spacks, Matthew J. Spireng, A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Joseph Stroud, Julie Suk, Daniel Tobin, Natasha Trethewey, David Wagoner, Kathleen Wakefield, Ronald Wallace, Donovan L. Welch, William Wenthe, Tarn Wilson, Charles Wright, Robert Wrigley, Paul Zimmer, Lisa Zimmerman.
Want to buy a copy? Click on Anhinga Press URL Below

http://www.anhinga.org/books/book_info.cfm?title=Poets%20Guide%20to%20the%20Birds

NEW YEAR'S WISH FOR PRACTICING POETS

A Wish For Your Poetry in the New Year

from Above the Frost Line.

Let your poems be as ivy, evergreen,

ever reaching for the transcendental.

SOUTHERN POETS AND WRITERS - A REMINDER

Fellow Poets and Writers, 

___It is time to take those last shots, make your vivid photos and print them.

___It is time to photocopy your poems and stories and send them out on the mail truck.

December will be too late.