Sonoma County Literary Update

Copperfield’s Books Renowned Speakers Presents

An Evening with

Billy Collins and Kay Ryan

Thursday, April 29 at 8:00 PM

Ruth Finley Person Theater at Wells Fargo Center for the Arts

50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa (Hwy 101 to River Road).

Experience the work of two poets laureate in one outstanding evening of poetry.

Billy Collins (Poet Laureate 2000-01) is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry and his readings are often standing room only.

Kay Ryan is a Marin County native and the 2008-09 Poet Laureate. She is known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes. Her funny and philosophical work has earned a carriage full of poetry prizes, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Tickets $25/$35

(707) 546-3600
or visit wellsfargocenterarts.org

Visit the artist’s websites Billy Collins and Kay Ryan

Dear Literary Folk,

Happy National Poetry Month! The weeks ahead promise to be extremely busy and creative. After the short top-of-the-news below, I invite you to browse the pages here  to check the announcements of events, readings, workshops, calls for submission, new writing groups forming, and new publications to celebrate. It’s quite a feast!

The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed

This month, Sixteen Rivers press releases a new anthology of 100 poems expressing the varied experiences of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The collection features a foreword by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, and poems by writers old and new.

You are all invited to attend the book launches this month:

Thursday, April 22, 7 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloway’s, 2904 College Ave. Berkeley

Saturday, April 17, 7 p.m. at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Boulevard, Corte Madera

Wednesday, April 28, 7 p.m. at Readers’ Books, 130 East Napa Street, Sonoma

You can read more about the anthology with links for online ordering at our website: www.sixteenrivers.org.

And check out this review by local writer Tim Nonn: http://bookcase.blogs.petaluma360.com/10552/a-consuming-wild-fire-of-love/.

Friends of the Poet Laureate

Any of you in the community who would like to lend your support to Gwynn in her projects are invited to contact Linda Galletta and the Poet Laureate Selection Committee. You can send a message to Linda at lindag@monitor.net or (707) 829-4797.

Sonoma County Literary Update Coming to an End in June

As most of you already know, I will be stepping down as the Literary Update editor in June of 2010. I’ve enjoyed so much the chance to bring the literary community a little closer and to help promote the readings, new publications, and workshops of my friends and fellow writers.

The difficult realities are these: The commitment of the volunteer hours each month has limited the time I can devote to my own writing and publishing these past seven years; and as the popularity of the Update and the companion website has grown, so have those hours—now ten/month. Unfortunately, at the same time, the donations I used to receive have almost completely disappeared.

I’ve been actively seeking an individual or group in the community to take over the newsletter and website, and hoping to hold a meeting this month to brainstorm possibilities.

Recently two individuals have contacted me: Tim Nonn, who writes a literary blog for Petaluma 360, the online version of the Argus Courier; and Tom Lombardo, Sonoma Arts Council Board Member who hosted the website Sonomaword.org.

I know you are all very busy. One glance at the April calendar is enough to confirm that! So, as no other members of the literary community have expressed an interest in meeting to discuss the future of the Literary Update, I’ll talk personally with Tim and Tom (sounds like a 60’s pop-music duo, doesn’t it?), and I’ll let you know if anything evolves.

One other thought: The Redwood Writers Club, which has really grown and widened its reach in the past five years, has a very fine website with a calendar of literary events. Quite possibly this will provide the information readers of the Literary Update have come to rely on. Here’s the web link to check it out: http://www.redwoodwriters.org/calendar.html.

Click on any of these pages from the menu at above to view the rest of the April Literary Update:

Monthly Calendar of Events

County-Wide News (Including News from East, West, and North County)

Calls for Submission

Sonoma County in Print

Local Workshop Leaders and Writing Consultants

Current and Upcoming Workshops

Writers’ Connections

Ongoing Writing Groups and Open Mic Readings

How to Send Announcements to the Literary Update

Dear Literary Folk,

Top of the news this month is both sad and celebratory. The sad news is the loss of two great women poets: Lucille Clifton, who passed away on February 13, and Ruth Daigon, who died on February 17, 2010.

Lucille Clifton’s poems, like her life, were inspirational. Indeed, many women’s lives were changed forever by reading Clifton’s great “homage to my hips.” If you don’t know her work, you’re in for a treat. If you do, perhaps you will enjoy rereading old favorites or discovering new ones in her prolific collections. Besides her astonishing career as a poet, Lucille Clifton held another honor–one which few poets can claim: she was a grand champion on the game show Jeopardy!

Poet Gerald Stern had this to say about her passing:

“I want to give thanks to the dear woman who suffered so much. To her wisdom—like no other; to her presence—like no other. I want to thank her for her humor, her memory, her stubbornness, her honesty, her grace, her anger. She will walk along some river—where else?—and she will know her way home by how the air feels, by the wind. There was nothing like her; there was no one like her. No one will cry mercy like her.”

Here’s a great web link to find out more: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/79.

Ruth Daigon was another force to be reckoned with. She was a singer, poet, editor and publisher. As a musician, she sang at Dylan Thomas’s funeral. She worked with W. H. Auden on a recording of Elizabethan verse and music for Columbia Records. As a poet, her poems earned many awards, and as the publisher and editor of Poets:On (with her husband Artie), she nurtured a poets’ conversation on a wide range of subjects. I was fortunate to know her and count her among my friends.

To find out more about Ruth and her poems, here are a couple of web links I recommend: http://www.tryst3.com/issue17/daigon.html http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/poetry/18573

D.A. Powell wins $100,000 prize for poetry

We also have some joyous news. I’m so pleased to announce that Doug Powell has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement that ran in the LA Times.

Photo of D.A. Powell: Trane DeVore

D.A. Powell, who teaches at the University of San Francisco, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. His books include “Tea,” “Lunch,” “Cocktails” and “Chronic.” In a review in The Times last year, John Freeman described Powell as “a modern romantic: obsessed, enraged and turned about by love. His language is infiltrated by songs, phrases from movies, the treacle-sweet soundtracks of so many musicals. ‘Love,’ he writes in one poem, ‘is the chorus waiting to be born.’ ”

The Tufts prize was established in 1992 to honor work by a midcareer poet. Powell is 46.

— Lee Margulies

Poetry Out Loud Winners

I’d also like to extend congratulations to Giovanny Espinosa and Brooke McLaughlin who took first place and first runner up in the Poetry Out Loud Competition on February 6. The competition was the most intense I’d ever witnessed, with 12 students delivering inspired and dramatic presentations.  Giovanny goes on from here to the state competition in Sacramento. You can find more on their winning performances in the County Wide News page of the Literary Update.

The rest of this month’s Literary Update can be accessed by clicking on the pages from the menu above.