Christopher Luna Reads with Jen Coleman & Jefferson Hansen at Passages Bookshop April 7, 2019
Jen Coleman, Jefferson Hansen & Christopher Luna
Sunday, April 7
7:00 p.m.
Passages Bookshop
1223 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd.
Portland, OR 97232
(503) 388-7665
info@passagesbookshop.com
$5 suggested donation for the readers (no one turned away)
Jen Coleman is author of PSALMS FOR DOGS AND SORCERERS, from Trembling Pillow Press, winner of the 2013 Bob Kaufman Book Prize selected by poet Dara Wier. Her second book, WE DENIZENS, was released from Furniture Press in 2016. Jen has been called “the heart’s bittersweet cartoonist” by poet Graham Foust, and “Walt Whitman and Elizabeth Bishop’s secret lovechild” by poet Richard Roundy. Originally from Minnesota, Jen received her BA from Beloit College and MFA from George Mason University in Virginia. She spent eight years in New York before moving to Portland, OR. She now lives in Portland, OR where she works for the Oregon Environmental Council.
Jefferson Hansen is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection 100 Hybrids (Post-Asemic Press). He has also authored Cruelty, a book of short stories, and and Beefheart saved Craig, a novel, both published by BlazeVox. He lives in Minneapolis.
Christopher Luna served as the first Poet Laureate of Clark County, WA from 2013-2017. His first full-length collection of poetry, Message from the Vessel in a Dream, was published by Flowstone Press in 2018. Luna has an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and is the co-founder, with Toni Lumbrazo Luna, of Printed Matter Vancouver, a small press for Northwest writers which also provides writing coaching, editing, and manuscript review. He has hosted the popular Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in Vancouver, WA since 2004. Luna’s books include Brutal Glints of Moonlight and The Flame Is Ours: The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure 1961-1978. In 2019 Uttered Chaos Press in Eugene, OR will release a revised and expanded edition of Christopher’s Ghost Town, USA, a decade-long investigative poem about Vancouver, WA.
*****
“Write me a poem,”
says Mom,
“that
I would like.”
“About death.”
Jen Coleman
this poem is under surveillance
this poem will be “read”
by more algorithms than people
this poem was written
while Spotify “played”
Spotify has more data
on this poem than I do
can Spotify “interpret” this poem
this poem was published
in a different form on Facebook
this poem is part of my
Facebook security download
this poem was emailed to the
publisher of this Print on Demand book
yet this poem exists most securely
in the Cloud
Jefferson Hansen
Channel Z (circa 1989)
suddenly static in my own time in your own time beware a tear can
appear a rip a slash through the static in a moment and suddenly too
suddenly you are not wherever you are but then again and there may
be no reason why but there you are in the lavender shorts the garment
that stuck around not wanting to miss a moment of this crisis this chaos
this crisis of faith this fundamental fissure in the unseen scripture you
rarely regarded as worth your time that time static that age static in my
attic laughs in a darkened kitchen and you did not then and you do not
now believe do not believe do not believe in anything but love
Christopher Luna, from Message from the Vessel in a Dream (Flowstone Press, 2018)
Also on view during the reading:
COLLAGES by KEITH WALDROP
March 26 – May 4
Opening Reception:
Tuesday, March 26, 6:00–9:00 pm
Seventy-two exquisite & vivid minuscule works by the acclaimed poet, translator, and copublisher of Burning Deck Press.
In a “Statement on Collage” from 1994, Keith Waldrop distinguishes two primary directions, typified by Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters. Waldrop tends generally toward the latter’s approach, in which “the debris that [Schwitters] has assembled fills the frame — there is no additional space, no container.”
For Keith, collage is “a way to explore, not necessarily the thing that I am tearing up, but the thing that I am contriving to build out of torn pieces.”
For a related exhibition and reading hosted by Wave Books and the Pacific NW College of Art in association with AWP, see the FB page Burning Deck Exhibit and Tribute to the Waldrops.
Collage Art by Christopher Luna for Message from the Vessel in a Dream