[POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER] Celebrate a Decade of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic with Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and Featured Reader Peggy Barnett On Saturday, November 22, 2014
Due to the severe weather warning issued for Oregon and SW Washington, Cover to Cover owner Mel Sanders has decided to close the bookstore on November 13. Therefore, we are postponing this month’s reading until Saturday, November 22 at 3pm. Please share this news with your friends and contact, and then join us on the 22nd for a celebration of our 10th Anniversary.
In November 2004, Christopher Luna founded what later came to be known as Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic. At the time there were very few poetry events in Vancouver, WA. The series began at Ice Cream Renaissance. He realized that he was filling a need in the community when the shop was packed for the first night of the reading. Today Ghost Town Poetry continues to be a community in which new and emerging writers can share their work in an environment that is fun, safe, and supportive. This month please join us in celebrating ten years of open mic poetry in Vancouver….
GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted by Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
and Printed Matter Vancouver founder Toni Partington
3pm
Saturday, November 22
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663
LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com
Featuring Peggy Barnett
Peggy Barnett was born in 1945 and grew up in Queens, New York in the 1950’s. She went to Public School 89, Joseph Pulitzer JHS 145, Music and Art High School and graduated from The Cooper Union with a degree in Fine Art. She opened a photography studio in 1968 and became a very successful corporate still-life and portrait photographer. She sold the studio in 2006 and moved north of Seattle to the green fields of Maltby, Washington.
Peggy knows that the Northwest is beautiful, but memories of the past haunt her: the Holocaust, growing up Jewish in an Italian and Irish neighborhood in Queens, the atomic bomb, public school, junior high school, and childhood’s distant happenings arise in her poetry as in a dream. Her mind flits back and forth between the present and the past. The present on the West Coast is always interrupted by the past of the East Coast. Her poetic memoirs On Your Left dwell on the specifics of unending change. For more info, visit http://www.prbarnett.com
My Vagabond Song
“The scarlett of the maples can shake me like
the cry of bugles going by”
A Vagabond Song, Bliss Carmen, 1894
A Macintosh Apple doesn’t travel well
across the country.
It needs to stay home in New England
in the crisp autumn nights that
turn leaves red and gold
in the black soil full of humous
and colonial history
crisp thin skin with
tang and tartness
cut with sugary juices to the snap bite.
Last year on my birthday
Kathy sent me
in an envelope
some Macintosh seeds
from an apple she had just eaten.
The smell of woodsmoke
down Frost’s country road
thick in mudtime
past orchards getting smaller
as they are everywhere.
I want to feel it’s dark red roundness
warm in my palm
so I can put my head down
and smell it
and go home.
Peggy Barnett, 2014
PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER 