| Event Archive |
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Open Books: Readings
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August 2010
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September 2010
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13 NORMAN FISCHER & EMILY WARN
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26 IN THEIR CUPS w/A.J. Rathbun & Pals
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30 DAVID YOUNG
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Monday, September 13, 2010 at 07:30 PM
NORMAN FISCHER & EMILY WARN
Norman Fischer is a Zen Buddhist priest as well as a poet, and his poetry reflects the presence, depth, and spark that come with such a vocation. His most recent collection is Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons ($16 Singing Horse Press), a title that prepares the reader for the richly varied sections within. Writing in lines sometimes expansive, sometimes skipping quick, he imbues his poems with an inquisitive, contemplative voice, a charming one both bold and humble -- "All I know about the world of things / I could muster in a moment in a teacup." His work explores with energetic care the perpetual and perpetually mysterious intermingling of thought and experience -- "The mind lights up the room and furniture appears." A former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, he is the founder and teacher for the Everyday Zen Foundation and co-founder of Makor Or, a Jewish meditation Center in San Francisco.
Joining Mr. Fischer is poet, essayist, teacher, and editor Emily Warn, whose own work has often explored the confluence of faith, language, and the world from which both arise. As she has written, "poetry links music and meaning every bit as powerfully and oddly as religious traditions do, inventing complicated, invisible relations." This evening she plans to share new work with us. The author of five collections, her most recent book is Shadow Architect ($15 Copper Canyon Press), an inventive and compelling consideration of the Hebrew alphabet. "Emily Warn is one tough poet," the Seattle Times wrote of her, "... she not only takes on God but also juggles the hot coals of memory and wrestles her way to an honest spiritual life." A founding editor of the website poetryfoundation.org, she now divides her time between Seattle and Twisp, Washington.
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Sunday, September 26, 2010 at 03:00 PM
IN THEIR CUPS w/A.J. Rathbun & Pals
Seattle's own A.J. Rathbun sports a resume as rare and intriguing as a bottle of scotch salvaged from a shipwreck. Not only is he the author of a collection of poetry (Want, published by ZYZZYVA/Creative Arts) and the co-founder of LitRag (a much missed literary magazine and poetry press), he is also a well respected mixologist, whose books on cocktails include, among others, Dark Spirits and Luscious Liqueurs. Given that pedigree, it was inevitable he should edit In Their Cups: Poems about Drinking Places, Drinks, and Drinkers ($9.95 Harvard Common Press), an anthology that sets out to be "a cocktail party where poets from throughout the centuries gather around the bar to spin stories, odes, and songs of sorrow and happiness, surrounded by bottles, ice, you, and your friends." The poets represented range from Catullus, Li Po, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Guillaume Apollinaire, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar to Richard Hugo, Stephen Dunn, Amy Fleury, Mark Halliday, Gerald Stern, and Chase Twichell. Mr. Rathbun will be joined by several contributors, including, but not limited to, Emily Bedard, Allen Braden, and James Gurley.
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Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 07:30 PM
DAVID YOUNG
David Young's contributions to poetry are considerable. A professor at Ohio's Oberlin College for some years, he has served as an editor of that school's esteemed literary magazine, FIELD, and of its well respected press, known for its contemporary poetry series and its works in translation. He has long been a translator himself, most recently of the poetry of Du Fu and Paul Celan. But he travels here today to read from his own work, the just published Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems ($27.95 Knopf), which draws from his decades of thoughtful, often deeply moving poetry. While he is indeed a poet of the Midwest, a landscape his work evokes with grace, he also casts his mind and vision to the larger world -- "Faint dawn, pale apricot, pale lime, / and the owl sails silent to his roost... / the history of the earth would be my gospel." This is a generous volume from one who has made a life practicing and studying his craft -- "At seventy now, I seem to be filled with voices, / scraps of the past, night shade, / blown visions, questions, / the touch of past parlayers, poets, friends. // As if I’m a vessel that must soon pour out / my brimming contents...."
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Friday, October 08, 2010 at 07:30 PM
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
San Francisco poet Matthew Zapruder reads from his third full-length
collection, Come on All You Ghosts, from Copper Canyon Press. He is an editor at Seattle's Wave Books.
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Sunday, October 17, 2010 at 03:00 PM
KELLI RUSSELL AGODON
Ms. Agodon reads from Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, which received the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. She lives in Kingston, Washington.
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Friday, October 22, 2010 at 07:30 PM
ELIZABETH J. COLEN & SHANE MCCRAE
Bellingham poet Ms. Colen's first full-length collection, Money for
Sunsets, received the Judge's Prize from Steel Toe Press. Shane McCrae's collection Mule is from Cleveland State University Press. A resident of Iowa, he holds degrees both from Harvard Law School and the Iowa Writers Workshop.
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Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 07:30 PM
MEGAN SNYDER-CAMP
Seattle poet Snyder-Camp reads from her book The Forest of Sure Things, published by Tupelo Press and winner of its award for Outstanding First Book.
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Thursday, November 04, 2010 at 07:30 PM
DOROTHEA LASKY & LEWIS WARSH
Dorothea Lasky reads from her second collection, Black Life, published by Wave Books. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Warsh, of New York City, will read from both recent poetry and prose. He is the author of numerous books, including A Place in the Sun, from Spuyten Duyvil, and Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005, from Granary Books.
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Tuesday, November 09, 2010 at 07:30 PM
OPEN ELSEWHERE SERIES
We begin our Open Elsewhere Series with a reading by the much lauded Tacoma-born poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg at the beautiful Chapel Performance Space in the Good Shepherd Center, just two blocks north of Open Books on Sunnyside. Ms. Schnacken-
berg reads from her just released sixth collection, Heavenly Questions, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 07:30 PM
KAZIM ALI & SARAH VAP
Poet and prose writer Kazim Ali, a professor at Oberlin College in Ohio,
reads from his latest book, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities, a work of creative non-fiction published by Wesleyan. Sarah Vap reads from her third collection, Faulkner's Rosary, from Saturnalia Books. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula.
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