LGBTQIA+ FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004
Rob Katsuno has been employed as a Boeing jet design engineer, a Mitsubishi Joint Venture Broker, a Morgan Stanley Investment Banker in NY and Tokyo. He holds an MBA from UCLA and currently works as a Ameriprise Financial Advisor. In 2011 he received third place in the Willamette Writers Kay Snow Writing Contest. He is also a talented performer who has appeared at BackfencePDX and United Solo, America’s largest solo performance festival in Theatre Row, NY. For more information about rob, visit robkatsuno.com
Dan Raphael performs at the Ford Building in Portland Photo by Robert Sanders
Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid, dan raphael’s 19th book, came out last June. Some of his newer poems appear in Caliban, Curly Mind, The Poeming Pigeon, In Between Hangovers and Otoliths. Every Wednesday he writes and records a news poem, as well as writing stories for the news anchors on KBOO Radio. He hosts Fo Po Poetry, a monthly reading series in Portland, and is the prose editor forUnlikely Stories, an e-zine based in New Orleans.
Looking for inspiration this summer? Why not spend some time with Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna, a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and a creative writing workshop leader with nearly two decades in the classroom. He would love to share his passion for poetry and storytelling with you.
If you are interested in taking one of these workshops, do not wait. Such classes will be canceled within 3-5 days of their beginning if the minimum enrollment numbers are not met.
Luna also facilitates a writing workshop from 11:30-2:30 on the second Saturday of every month at Niche Wine Bar (1013 Main Street, next door to Angst Gallery and the Kiggins Theatre).
Get LIFTED and join us for a very unique writing workshop with Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna! Christopher spent his late teens and early twenties working in a head shop on Long Island. He believes that mindful use of marijuana can be a powerful tool for consciousness expansion. Christopher is completely turned on by poetry’s ability to encourage empathy and compassion, and to spark the shifts in consciousness which can lead a person to fight for progressive social change. He would love to share his passion for poetry with you.
Christopher Luna is also the Clark County Poet Laureate, and he and his wife, Toni Partington, founded Printed Matter Vancouver, and co-host Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic, the popular reading series Luna established in 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. Recent publications include WA 129, The Poeming Pigeon: Doobie or Not Doobie, Bombay Gin, Unshod Quills, and It’s Animal But Merciful.
Pens and Pencils will be provided. Please bring something to write on or a laptop.
Space is limited, so be sure to sign up today to #getLIFTED! Tickets are a $20 suggested donation. Online reservation is required to attend the class.
21+, non-refundable/ non-transferable. If attendance requirements are not met the class will be canceled 24 hours before the class begins. Tickets will be refunded at that time.
Bring Your Own Cannabis
Valid Photo ID is required for entrance to the event.
Want to do some writing but don’t have a lot of spare time? Come to a one-session mini course at Clark College’s downtown campus for beginners and experienced writers alike who want to generate new work and engage in dialogue. Read, listen to, and briefly write poetry together. Whet your appetite for poetry with a workshop that touches on how to discover, write, and rewrite a poem. Bring paper and pen or laptop. Ages 16 and over.
Poetry as a means of expression, exploration, and experience is available to everyone. Write poetry in response to prompts and read a variety of published poems that you can use as inspiration. Read and respond to one another’s work in this supportive setting, paying close attention to revision.
1072273 Mon. 10 am – 12:30 pm Jun. 19 – Aug. 14 $190 [8 classes] No class July 3
4. Summer Classes at Clark College (Registration Begins May 22)
Everyone has a story to tell. Each person’s life is filled with adventure, mystery, trouble, and triumph. Memoirs are a powerful way to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all human beings. Clark County’s Poet Laureate will encourage you to begin to see yourself as a part of history. Documenting your life is a wonderful gift for your family as well as a profoundly fulfilling experience for the writer.
Item number: 9100
7/12/2017- 8/16/2017 Wednesdays
1:00PM – 3:20PM
$159
CCE 208 (Clark College’s downtown campus, 500 Broadway
Vancouver, WA 98660 on the second floor of the Columbia Bank building)
Poetry Matters: Writing Poetry
Beginners and experienced writers alike will generate new works and discuss the poet’s role in the community. Read, listen to, and write poetry together in a supportive class focused on providing gentle, constructive feedback. Discuss how to construct a manuscript and ready it for publication. Writers of all experience levels are welcome. Bring paper and pen or laptop. Ages 16 and over.
Item: K154
7/10/2017- 8/14/2017 Mondays
6:00PM – 8:30PM
$129
CCE 208 (Clark College’s downtown campus, 500 Broadway
Vancouver, WA 98660 on the second floor of the Columbia Bank building)
Christopher Luna and Toni Partington in the KBOO studios in Portland, OR
Poet and activist Judith Arcana recently interviewed Printed Matter Vancouver founders Christopher Luna and Toni Partington for her radio program, Poetry and Everything
We’d like to thank Judith for her hospitality and her thoughtful questions. We are also grateful to our friend and fellow poet, Patrick Bocarde, for engineering the program.
Poetry And Everything Air date: Mon, 04/24/2017 -10:00pm to 11:00pm
Interview with Toni Partington and Christopher Luna
Chris and Toni co-host Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic, the series he established in 2004. Together they founded Printed Matter Vancouver, a small press and editing service. Not only are there two of them, working together on those projects, but each of them does (notably) more than two things.
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004
Featuring Sam Roxas-Chua
Sam Roxas-Chua is a poet and visual artist from Eugene, Oregon. His poetry has been described as “tidal,” and he has been called “a man who can take any kind of physical material and transform them into art.” According to poet Dorianne Laux, “Like Jack Gilbert before him, Roxas-Chua reaches beyond the imagery and emotions we expect—creating his own universe, logic, and definitions of the beautiful.” His first book, Fawn Language, was published by Tebot Bach in 2013 and his current manuscript, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, is forthcoming from Lithic Press. His poems have appeared in various journals including Narrative, december Magazine, and Cream City Review. His collection of poems, Diary of Collected Summers, won the first place award in the 7th Annual Missouri Review Audio Competition in poetry. Most recently he appeared in a live broadcast of Dear Sugar Radio at the Aladdin Theater in support of #writersresist. He is the owner of The Poetry Loft, a small business dedicated to community writing workshops. He holds an MFA from Pacific University.
Angst Gallery showcases cultural events including art shows, musical performances, book launch parties, classes, workshops, and the monthly Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic. All art forms are valued. More than just a place to show art, Angst Gallery is also a safe space for community discussion, where all people are respected for who they are. We donate the use of the space to organizations that work for human rights and progressive social change such as Planned Parenthood, the YMCA/YWCA, Cascade AIDS Project, and the NAACP.
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004
Featuring Laura LeHew and R.R. Seitz
Laura LeHew’s collections include Becoming (Another New Calligraphy), Willingly Would I Burn, (MoonPath Press), It’s Always Night, It Always Rains, (Winterhawk Press) and Beauty (Tiger’s Eye Press). Laura received her MFA from CCA. She edits a small press called Uttered Chaos. Laura always thought she’d be an astronaut. For more information, visit http://www.lauralehew.com/.
R.R. Seitz writes from the place of decisions made by an eighteen-year-old that carry forward, day-by-day, to the present. His 2006 book Right Here Right Now is in its third printing and made its way to odd places outside the U.S., including Southeast Asia. He has been featured around at various readings throughout the Northwest for 15 years. And yes, it is true, he has no letters behind his name.
Symposium by Laura LeHew
He brings me poison
words tormented love separation
a withered bouquet woven
with absinth wormwood
abandonment boredom regret
starry anemones delicate asphodels prickly
burdock the seeming happy amethyst and canary carnations
screaming antipathy and disdain
an untranslatable orange lily
whispering hatred against a pale vase
vain dream-like clusters of hydrangeas
jealous lemon hyacinths lost
in the sorrow of their vivid violet sisters
and
a forsaken single blood red tulip—the perfect suitor
[IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to icy conditions, this month’s Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic has been postponed until January 19. Please help us share this news, and stay safe.]
Jen Coleman is the author of Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers from Trembling Pillow Press, winner of the 2013 Bob Kaufman Book Prize selected by poet Dara Wier, and We Denizens from Furniture Press in 2016. 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, where she co-edited the journal POM2. She now lives in Portland, OR. Coleman’s set will include one poem accompanied by drummer and songwriter Cat Minor.
Let’s Be Tarsiers by Jen Coleman
It’s too cruel to be a bloody human.
Let’s be a boom-slang, viper or hippo.
Let’s be tarsiers born with fur and eyeballs
big as our brains. Let’s have the long, long feet.
Let me call you tarsier like the long long
bones in your feet. Let me be a tarsier
and balance eye with eye and stay silent.
Take your third tarsier finger and touch my
third finger as long as your upper arm.
Touch your two tarsier toes to my two toes.
Eat bugs and lizards and know me, tarsier
As I know you, tarsier, feasting on bats.
Be awake in the night with me, tarsier,
and leap, and be quite quiet and quite shy.
Mike G: I’ve been writing for my sanity for quite some time now. It’s the most fun, and the most serious thing I do. For me, performing is the public celebration of this sanity. Now and then I’ve read my poems on KBOO radio. Now and then my poems get published. To say it another way: I oozed from the womb in Michigan with hardly more life than a manikin, then the Muse infused me with madness, inspired my wordplay of rage and sadness, or sometimes funny, so it’s said; I’ll clown and rant until i’m dead.
Mike G reads at Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic (photo by Tiffany Burba)
After the plague of boils Job scalded his secret patience formula upon my soul. That’s me lounging on the rotting log spitting a protest melody into the unwashed harmonica. The cold sun is a kind of food. I watch the leaves eat. Eyes fierce and blue in the whiteout blizzard. That’s me, the keeper of memory, not buried yet, heart still beating.
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CHRISTOPHER LUNA: While I hate to do this, I am going to have to call off tonight’s reading. I just ventured out, and it does not seem safe to drive right now. I don’t imagine that the roads will be much better at 6pm. Please check Facebook and printedmattervancouver.com for updates on when we will reschedule Mike G and Rob Katsuno’s featured reading.
I think that this is the first time I’ve canceled the event due to weather in our history. I know that this is disappointing, but I would feel terrible if anyone got hurt while traveling to Ghost Town.
Stay warm, stay safe, and please do what you can to help us inform everyone that we will not be gathering at Angst tonight.
Gratefully,
Christopher Luna
GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Lumbrazo Luna
7 pm Thursday, December 8
Open mic sign up begins at 6:30 and closes at 7
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
Featuring Mike G and Rob Katsuno
Mike G: I’ve been writing for my sanity for quite some time now. It’s the most fun, and the most serious thing I do. For me, performing is the public celebration of this sanity. Now and then I’ve read my poems on KBOO radio. Now and then my poems get published. To say it another way: I oozed from the womb in Michigan with hardly more life than a manikin, then the Muse infused me with madness, inspired my wordplay of rage and sadness, or sometimes funny, so it’s said; I’ll clown and rant until i’m dead.
After the plague of boils Job scalded his secret patience formula upon my soul. That’s me lounging on the rotting log spitting a protest melody into the unwashed harmonica. The cold sun is a kind of food. I watch the leaves eat. Eyes fierce and blue in the whiteout blizzard. That’s me, the keeper of memory, not buried yet, heart still beating.
Rob Katsuno has been employed as a Boeing jet design engineer, a Mitsubishi Joint Venture Broker, a Morgan Stanley Investment Banker in NY and Tokyo. He holds an MBA from UCLA and currently works as a Ameriprise Financial Advisor. In 2011 he received third place in the Willamette Writers Kay Snow Writing Contest. He is also a talented performer who has appeared at BackfencePDX and United Solo, America’s largest solo performance festival in Theatre Row, NY. For more information about rob, visit robkatsuno.com
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004 angstgallery.com
Featuring Naomi Fast, author of
Portland Light: Post-Industrial City Poems and Photography
Naomi Fast is an American poet, artist, and photographer who grew up in California, Brussels, and Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo). Ms. Fast earned her MA in Writing from Portland State University, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Shelley Reece Award. Her poetry has been published around the U.S. in various journals and anthologies includingEmpty Shoes and VoiceCatcher, a journal featuring women authors and artists of the Pacific Northwest. In addition, her poem “Kajiji Fires” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The poems and photographs in Fast’sPortland Light: Post-Industrial City Poems & Photography, provide a glimpse into the Rose City’s evolution over a ten-year period.
Fantasy by Naomi Fast
According to Naomi, “I consider my Portland Light poems to be ‘light’ in language, length, mood and tone—they are, if you will, ‘language snapshots.’ My hope is that they also reveal bits of a city that aren’t readily seen unless we shine a light on them.”
Awning of Stars by Naomi Fast
Eclipse
by Naomi Fast
We photograph the bronze moon
in increments.
Planets collaborate
enlightening our address
with sun and moon’s embrace.
We’ve lived rivers and oceans of years
but it only takes one
cloudless September night
to eclipse them all,
to reveal with a flash
this naked moment
of our sameness.
Latitude # 1, edited by Rob Gourley, photo by Chris Gourley
FEATURING Natosha Natoaster Snider, Melissa Sillitoe-Bocarde, Dan Raphael, Robert Rahula, Joshua Baker, Toni Partington (aka Lumbrazo-Luna), Christopher Luna, & more.
LATITUDE, in its first issue published this week, spotlights several emerging poets along with new texts offered by some leading poets who curate spoken word events in the Portland-Vancouver metro area.
Objective was to produce a journal focused on expressive arts, what my professor, Nicholas Crome, used to refer to as “small literary magazines” back in the early 70s. Method involved gathering material from all sorts of contacts, without offering a preconceived theme for the issue, nor excessive guidelines, because I was hoping to be able to present both topical and stylistic variety. As for selection, I fortunately was able to accept something from each contributor. Results are initially appealing, although ultimately this is in the hands of the readers.
THIS SMALL JOURNAL focused on expressive arts is available in the following independent shops:
Meet Me Where I Left You is the latest book from Printed Matter Vancouver.
Meet Me Where I Left You, the debut collection of poetry and short prose by Tiffany Burba, captures her real and imagined New York City adventures of love, lust, museums, jazz, food, and running in Central Park. She has an amazing love affair with the City and its inhabitants stretching from Brooklyn to Queens, the Bronx to Manhattan, and all points between. Living on whiskey kisses, a subway pass, and everything from pizza to soup dumplings, Burba fills and breaks her heart and ours along the way. Meet Me Where I Left You explores her arrivals and departures, her dreams of leaving Pacific Northwest forests for the taxi rides and street grime of New York City, her love of family and friends, and her unashamed quest for passion. Please contact Printed Matter Vancouver to book Tiffany Burba for interviews and readings: printedmattervancouver@gmail.com.
Meet Me Where I Left You by Tiffany Burba
ISBN-13: 978-1535522502 / ISBN-10: 153552250X
Edited and Designed by Toni Lumbrazo Luna
Published By Printed Matter Vancouver
About the Author
Tiffany Burba reads her work at the launch for Poetry Moves, a Printed Matter Vancouver-sponsored program which placed poems by Burba and nine other Clark County, WA poets on C-Tran buses in 2016
Tiffany Burba is a poet and photographer who lives in the Pacific NW. She began writing in 2009 as a way to process a very painful relationship. She found that writing was the one way to express all emotions and be completely vulnerable while healing the pain of heartbreak. She is a photographer who likes to capture sunsets, sunflowers, and the New York skyline. She is a mother of two and a grandmother of one.
Tiffany is a massage therapist and Reiki practitioner who believes in the body’s ability to heal itself. She loves to dance, drink whiskey, and spend time with poets, musicians, and people who enjoy life.
Christopher Luna’s flyer for the official book launch for Meet Me Where I Left You
Advance Praise for Meet Me Where I Left You
Tommy Gaffney, author of Whiskey Days and Three Beers From Oblivion: Tiffany Burba is a generous storyteller cursed with a muse that won’t sit still. Her work is more than a simple love story or an homage, though. Her poems are as much a part of her being as perspiration or tears. In Meet Me Where I Left You, the love is real, the hurt is real, the longing, the sadness, the courage, all of it is real. Tangible. “Soup Dumplings” and “Recovery” speak loudest to me, though the exercise of picking favorites from this book is akin to picking favorite waves in the ocean.
Mike G., Portland poet/performer: In Meet Me Where I Left You, Tiffany Burba creates brave wordscapes of love broken, love restored, and dreams of New York. With vast humanity and invincible heart this collection does what great poetry always does: it heals us.
April Bullard, author of The Sock Thief and Goody Hepzibah’s Harvest Tales: The honest exposure of needs, desires, and relationships thrown against the bustling backdrop of The Big Apple grabbed my attention. Taste and walk your way through a birthday trip to New York City, through the eyes and heart of a fiercely passionate woman searching for a love that will join souls into one eternal, burning star. The raw energy and pure need revealed in the author’s unveiled prose will sting, searing a striving silhouette of hope between these pages.
PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER 