CORRECTION: Due to circumstances beyond his control, Ric Vrana will be unable to attend May’s Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic. His friend David Matthews will take his place, and Ric’s reading will be postponed until November. More information to follow. Christopher Luna, co-host and founder.
GHOST TOWN POETRY Open Mic
hosted by Christopher Luna and
Toni Partington
7pm Thursday, May 10, 2012
and every second Thursday
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B
(St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA
360-993-7777
all ages and uncensored since 2004
http://christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com
With our featured reader, Ric Vrana:
Ric Vrana appears regularly in numerous venues and open mics in the Portland and Vancouver poetry scene. His early days of stand-up poetry happened in Seattle where he found himself at the beginning of the long running Red Sky Poetry Theater in the early 1980s. But he fell in with a bad crowd, and after a long slog through graduate school worked as a professor in Portland.
After some disagreeable business with the dean, he found himself a job as a planner, and, upon being called back up to be an adjunct in another part of the university, continues to teach part time in the urban planning program. His writing is infused with the perspective of the geographer, the cartographer, and the planner. He believes place is the connection between where he is and who he is. He writes about this, thinks about this, dreams about this.
Poems by Ric Vrana have appeared in Duwamish Review, Kent Popular Press, Broken Word: The Alberta Street Anthology, Volume 2, Blown Out: Portland’s Indie Poets, and Venetian Blind Drunk. He is a regular contributor to the Three Friends Caffeinated Art Poetry readings in Portland. He has twice been published by the weekly on-line zone, “Work,” and has a poem and recorded reading forthcoming in OccuPoetry.org. Ric’s three chapbooks will be available at the reading for five dollars each or three for twelve: Brain Screams (2010); Postales desde Costa Rica (2011); and Semi-Ambivalent Middle Aged Male Lament #25 (2011).
From “Brain Screams”
Brain screams, primordial
dreams dancing
that white line between
northbound and south city
bus sounds and some
Greyhounds running
through clouds of particulates.
Walking now moving
behind ironrailed fences
in citypark gardens
couples everywhere, people in pairs
people who stare
at me, alone looking skyward
at rubber sheathed wires
carrying unheard messages
sagging in the middle of their span.
How Alone I’ve Grown
not even owned
by a telephone!
Face feeling taught
as the strain of grief being deep
from another night’s empty empty sleep
is this morning disgusted and eagerly seeks
the soft touch and voice of
some woman.
PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER 