Easy Speak Open Mike Serving Greater Seattle – bring your best and listen to the rest
Featuring Christopher Luna Monday, 10 June 2019
Wedgwood Ale House & Cafe 8515 35th Ave NE Seattle, WA 98115 206.527.2676
The open mike starts at 8:00 (with sign-up prior to that). Christopher will come on between 8:40 and 8:50 and give us 20 minutes or so of work.
Christopher Luna by Alisha Jucevic
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, GHOST TOWN, USA and The Flame Is Ours: The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure 1961-1978.
Message from the Vessel in a Dream (Flowstone Press, 2018) featuring poetry and collage art by Christopher Luna
Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Lumbrazo Luna of Printed Matter Vancouver Featuring John Burgess
7 pm Thursday, May 9, 2019 Open mic sign up begins at 6:30 and closes at 7 FREE
Angst Gallery 1015 Main Street Vancouver, WA 98660 angstgallery.com
Food and libation provided by Niche Wine Bar, 1013 Main Street Sound provided by Briz Loan & Guitar: http://briz.us/ LGBTQ+ FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004
John Burgess grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana, taught English in Japan, and since 1985 has lived in Seattle, where he works for an insurance company. Past glories include: 2006 Jack Straw writer; co-founder of the original Burning Word Festival; 2008 Words’ Worth curator for the Seattle City Council; and past Board president at Hugo House, Seattle’s creative writing center. He’s a co-instigator with the Band of Poets. He has five books of poetry, some with maps and drawings, from Ravenna Press: Punk Poems (2005), A History of Guns in the Family (2008), Graffito (2011), “by Land…” (2015), and 1977 (2018).
From 1977:
SPLEEN
I sing in praise of destitute dogs,
for days of melancholy rut
snouts bowed subservient
dissonance from the gut—
of strays, bile and vile
ion charged connected
for scent of beaten,
canine teeth retracted
Consistently East by Matthew Eiford-Schroeder, the fifth book of poetry from Printed Matter Vancouver
Advance Praise for Consistently East
“If art is animated by the shock of the new, Matthew Eiford-Schroeder has presented the reader with a top grade set of jumper cables. Consistently East is a startlingly good and often brilliant book of poems, one that makes harmony of its surface contrasts. Radical and clear in its language, cosmopolitan and Northwest homegrown in its intellectual sensibility, powerful in the way it interrogates the modern nature of power, it is a book that exemplifies the best verities of American travel literature by taking a hammer to the clichés of the genre at its worst. Reaching to both Whitman and Milosz, Consistently East is a book of the first rank that deserves to be read by as many people as possible.” Robert Lashley, Stranger Genius Award Nominee and author of The Homeboy Songs and Up South.
“Traveling roads in between two stages of apocalypse, here is a friend’s diary written on a hostel wall. Through poetry, we relax into the same curiosity and fear of the wanderer, his flashbacks becoming ours. Love, insight, and invitation command this collection. And the revelation that our memoir is safest in the hands of a madman.” – Tongo Eisen-Martin, author of Heaven is All Goodbyes (City Lights), winner of the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry.
About Consistently East
“What is adventure in the time of Google Maps? If hardship is what separates an adventure from a vacation, how does one reconcile the ease of travel with the challenges one faces?” Matthew Eiford-Schroeder wrote the poems in Consistently East as he emerged from the fog of a brain injury he suffered as a result of a violent attack. Join the poet on his global travels from Brooklyn, New York to London, across Mongolia via a charity rally, then on to Seoul, Korea. After returning to the West Coast of the United States to visit his family, Matthew attempted to work the oil fields of North Dakota before finally returning to Brooklyn, where he was assaulted. “I wrote these poems when the world stopped shaking enough for me to collect and organize words again. I had to rebuild myself, take an inventory of memories, then create. To begin to live in a world that had changed in a self that was no longer the same, but both not completely severed from the trauma and beauty of the past.”
About the Author
Matthew Eiford-Schroeder was raised in Camas, Washington, where he spent a sizable portion of his time working and playing on his grandparents’ cattle farm. He moved around America, working retail and lifting heavy things, before eventually landing in New York, where he snuck into an art school and became a bouncer. He currently lives in Bellingham, where he is studying political science at Western Washington University.
Please join Printed Matter Vancouver co-founders Christopher Luna and Toni Partington and the Vancouver poetry community on August 9, 2018 when we celebrate the release of Consistently East at Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic.
GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington
7pm Thursday, September 10 Angst Gallery 1015 Main Street Vancouver, WA 98660
Food and libation provided by Niche Wine and Art Bar, 1013 Main Street
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004 printedmattervancouver.com angstgallery.com
With our featured reader, Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen
Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen Photo by John Ulman
Elizabeth Austen is the Washington State Poet Laureate for 2014-16. Her collection Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011) was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work is also available on the CD Skin Prayers and in two chapbooks. Elizabeth spent her teens and twenties working in the theatre and writing poems. A six-month solo walkabout in the Andes region of South America led her to focus exclusively on poetry. She earned an MFA in Poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles, and is the poetry commentator for NPR-affiliate KUOW 94.9. She makes her living at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where she also offers poetry and reflective writing workshops for the staff. For more information please visit http://wapoetlaureate.org/
Elizabeth Austen will also be teaching a generative writing workshop at the Vancouver Library the same afternoon:
Poetry for All Thursday, September 10, 2015 2 – 4pm Vancouver Community Library Klickitat Room, Level 4
901 C St Vancouver, WA 98660
Join Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen for a free, hands-on poetry workshop designed to engage participants’ imaginations, life histories and sense of empathy through language. The class includes close reading of a few contemporary poems, then using one as a model for writing our own first draft. No previous writing experience needed.
Library events and programs are free and although everyone is welcome, space is limited. Preregistration is required and closes Sept 9 at 5pm. Maximum 25 participants.
PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER 