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| Third Thursdays at SPARC |
He is currently working on a dictionary of Nickisms, his invented contributions to the English lexicon, like the term chronicide.**
Ron Koertge
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| Life is but a poem...or novel. (Ron Koertge) |
() Poet and young-adult novelist Ron Koertge grew up in rural Olney, Illinois, and received a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from the University of Arizona.
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| Is no topic verboten in poetry? |
Comfortable in both free verse and received form, Koertge writes poetry marked by irreverent yet compassionate humor and a range of personas and voices. He has published numerous collections of poetry. His novels and novels-in-verse for young readers include the popular Stoner & Spaz.
Koertge’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a California Arts Council grant, and inclusion in numerous anthologies such as Best American Poetry, Poetry 180, and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column.
Koertge’s young-adult fiction has won awards from the American Library Association and PEN America. For many years, Koertge taught in the MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He lives with his wife in South Pasadena, California. More: Poetry Foundation
In the crowd
Other readers were in the house: GT Foster was reading from Warped by War his new collection of poems about being in Thailand during the US War on Vietnam (and Cambodia and Laos), derived from his novel The Boys Are Not Refined (Butt Naked Press). Helena and other Quakers, Toti O'Brien, Barbs Bagwell, and British poet Martin Jago.
She was the Poo
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| Kahnstallations by Mand Kahn ( Los Angeles) | The Poetry Foundation |
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.
It was the Poo
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| Everyone does what? (Etsy) |
passing through without clinging i let go
what was once a part of me i part with
and so unstuck unplugged without
consternation do what is due with my dew
for all i have been of drink and stool
of toad and such delicacies sautéed
or stewed garlic umami and kosher salt
and for all i know all that fixes me to the
ground sending samples of soil
to the earth below
[Oh, Pooh and Eeyore, too, we all do; even
the dull Dodo and the Duke their dookie do
unblemished Dove and Duchess untouched
by soot do do their doo, too. Everyone Poo's.]
Mandy Kahn
(Poetry Foundation) ...in true LA form, enthusiastically live-tweeted by audience member Jenna Elfman, Mandy Kahn has been developing more ideas for poetry installations — an active syllable conservationist; she's now dubbed them "Kahnstallations." She says:
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| Mandy Kahn, live at the Getty Museum, LA |
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to inject some energy into the poetry reading format. Slam poets have found a way to make their readings extremely appealing to wide audiences, as have the spoken word poets, and the avant poetry world seems to be doing lots of format experimentation, too. But I’d like to see mainstream poets find that same wider audience — that audience of fans who aren’t writers themselves. So I’m experimenting. Tonight I’ll be trying out four installations, and at the end of the night I’ll pass out comment cards so audience members can let me know which installations worked best for them. And I’ll keep writing new installations — keep honing — until I find a few that audiences seem to respond to. More
What is "slam" poetry?
SLAM: (Youth Speaks) "Somewhere in America" by Los Angeles Team
- Poetry slam is a competitive art event in which poets perform spoken word poetry before a live audience and a panel of judges.
"Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?"
By Ron Koertge
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| Featured poet Ron Koertge, MFA |
Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.
It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.
Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.
Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.
Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.
You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."
Then start again.
*Joseph Nicks, The Horizontal Forest
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| The Horizontal Forest as seen and lamented from the ground (treejourney.com) |
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Terrestrial Anthr-apology
long after this unsustainable
infrastructure collapses
beneath the burden
of fecundity and affluence
and digital instability
the oozing oilfields,
damned-up rivers,
dried-out aquifers
the bird-and-bat-bashing windmills,
battery-burgeoning e-wasted landfills
the acres of solar panels
supplanting the plants,
impeding the photosynthetic necessity
the combusted troposphere,
de-ozonified stratosphere
the phosphorescent coastal dead zones,
deforested/defrosted Amazonia/Antartica
the vanished worldwide megafauna
all will stand as silent testaments
to the ephemeral hyper-potency
of runaway hominism
whose viral expansion
from Pleistocene to Plastocene
left the far and wide terrestrium
styrofoaming at the seas
we could've lived less largely
but that's not the way we roll
of course it's going to take some healing, but
it certainly won't be a first for the Earth
to have survived a mass extinction,
though never one of such intelligent design...
the eons will season
themselves again
and life will re-diversify
with no remembrance of those
naked, tailless, erectile monkeys
run amok for that horrible fortnight
so many ice ages ago
the grasses will
give it no glossing
and the worms won't
wonder who won
and in the understory
become the prologue
of stories yet to unfold,
a prideless proliferation
of unapologetic anthropods
will go on about their business
as they've been doing for
four hundred million years
Unclenched: a passive fist's manifesto
By Joseph Nicks
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| Unclenched: a passive fist's |
No, it is the manus hominis that has allowed this species to be so constructive. Of course, as with those other two aforementioned structures, it can be just as adept at wielding weapons as it can tools. And when it is clenched into a fist, it is pretty much useless for anything other than fucking things up.
Though some of them may be infused with a certain degree of anger, none of the poems in this book, for example, could have been written had these fists not managed to come occasionally unclenched. More
**Chronicide
_-_Time_Clipping_Cupid's_Wings_(1694).jpg) |
| The God Chronos: "Time Clipping Cupid's Wings" (1694) by Pierre Mignard (1610-1695) |
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| Seven (art by Lorna Alkana) |
eyes downcast, shoulders slumped
He passed sentence as I mumble-prayed
in a dead language within the echo chamber
between the ears of years, lips aquiver.
"Have you anything to say for yourself?" he asked,
having so heavily handed down the court's
sentence. "Guilty as charged" was all I could
think to say. If one is going to be honest, this is
probably not the time to start. But my jury of peers
had me dead to rights. What was there to deny with
all the evidence stacked before me? I'll take the plea
had it been on offer, I could see in hindsight.
The Butterfly Papillon realized the same thing.
Of all crimes, this the inexcusable
Of all sentences, this the unretractable
"What did you call it?" I asked the judge in one last stand.
"Chronicide," he gurgled in disgust, "killing time."*
What's next?
- OPEN MIC NIGHT (free) at the Altadena Library, Monday, July 7, 6:00-7:30 pm Altadena — Altadena Library District
- *Killing a Homo (as in a Homo sapiens or "Man thinking") is homicide so, naturally, killing time is Chronicide (a Nickism by Joseph Nicks).
- Ron Koertge, Mandy Kahn, Joseph Nicks, Steve McQueen (Papillion, 1973); all uncredited poetry by Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation) (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly
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