Sunday May 24, Dawn Potter and Martin Steingesser read at River Arts in Damariscotta, Maine. River Arts is doing good things for the arts and can be found by clicking on the title of this post.
Martin is Portland, Maine's first Poet Laureate, 2007 - 2009. Author of "Brothers of Morning" published by Deerbrook Editions in 2002, is usually active teaching writing workshops in Maine schools, Martin is also performing his new work "The Thinking Heart," an ensemble performance work in two voices, with cello, based on the writings of a Dutch woman, Etty Hillesum, who died in the Holocaust.
"The Thinking Heart" CD is being released by Old Port Records. Listen to a short feature, with excerpts from "The Thinking Heart" here.
Dawn Potter, author of "Boy Land & Other Poems" published by Deerbrook Editions in 2004, recently received a writing fellowship, and has a Milton memoir "Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton" out from the University of Massachusetts Press. Dawn is also active as associate director of the "Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching" in Franconia, New Hampshire, as a free lance book editor, and teacher of creative writing. Scroll down to post 4/7/09 for more, or go through the archive above. Dawn was interviewed by Sewanee Review. This is the link from the Sewanne site map but it doesn't seem to be working now, and tags cannot contain tags (to the interview) on the blog. Sorry. We will investigate.
UP COMING APPEARANCES for Dawn Potter
Book signing, MWPA's Books & Blooms, Boothbay, ME, July 11 MWPA
Poetry workshop, MWPA fall retreat, Haystack, Deer Isle, ME, Sept. 11-13
"Poets Writing Memoir," reading with Elizabeth Garber, Belfast Free Library, Belfast, ME, Sept. 29
Reading with Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Community Bookstore, 143 7th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn, October 13
Visiting writer, Stonecoast MFA program, January
6/15/09
4/23/09
Reading at the Blue Hill Public Library
POETS KESTENBAUM, LITTLE & STEINGESSER
LIVE AT THE BLUE HILL LIBRARY
BLUE HILL—To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Blue Hill Library is hosting poets Stuart Kestenbaum, Carl Little and Martin Steingesser. Their reading will take place in the library’s Howard Room on Thursday, April 23, at 7:00 p.m. Books will be available for purchase and signing, with part of the proceeds supporting the library.
Kestenbaum is the author of three books of poems, most recently "Prayers & Run-on Sentences." His poems have been read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated American Life in Poetry column. As director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Kestenbaum has integrated poetry into the craft curriculum.
Little’s poems have appeared in Down East, Puckerbrush Review, Narramissic Notebook, Wolf Moon Journal and other publications. His collection "Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems" appeared in 2006. He is director of communications and marketing at the Maine Community Foundation where he oversees the Dibner Writing Fellowship.
The first poet laureate of Portland, Steingesser has performed his poetry across Maine and beyond. He recently completed a series of poems based on the journal and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who died in the Holocaust. Steingesser is the author of "Brothers of Morning." His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and Café Review.
All three poets are featured in "The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse," edited by Wesley McNair.
LIVE AT THE BLUE HILL LIBRARY
BLUE HILL—To celebrate National Poetry Month, the Blue Hill Library is hosting poets Stuart Kestenbaum, Carl Little and Martin Steingesser. Their reading will take place in the library’s Howard Room on Thursday, April 23, at 7:00 p.m. Books will be available for purchase and signing, with part of the proceeds supporting the library.
Kestenbaum is the author of three books of poems, most recently "Prayers & Run-on Sentences." His poems have been read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated American Life in Poetry column. As director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Kestenbaum has integrated poetry into the craft curriculum.
Little’s poems have appeared in Down East, Puckerbrush Review, Narramissic Notebook, Wolf Moon Journal and other publications. His collection "Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems" appeared in 2006. He is director of communications and marketing at the Maine Community Foundation where he oversees the Dibner Writing Fellowship.
The first poet laureate of Portland, Steingesser has performed his poetry across Maine and beyond. He recently completed a series of poems based on the journal and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who died in the Holocaust. Steingesser is the author of "Brothers of Morning." His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and Café Review.
All three poets are featured in "The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse," edited by Wesley McNair.
4/9/09
Poets House Showcase
Last weekend Deerbrook Editions was represented by Joan Siegel visiting the Poets House Showcase in the beautiful Jefferson Market Branch Library in New York. Her book "Hyacinth for the Soul" and Mimi White's "The Last Island" are the books in the showcase. All of our books are in the collection, and it is a good feeling knowing one or two are in the spring showcase. We look forward to Poets House settling into their new location. You can visit their website here.
See archive 03/08 - 03/15 (1) for more on Joan's book.
Through Saturday, April 11 The 17th Annual Poets House Showcase
Don't miss the final days of this exciting display of all the new poetry and poetry-related books published in the United States in the last year. Over 2,000 titles—including chapbooks, DVDs, CDs, anthologies, translations and more—have been gathered together in the landmark Jefferson Market Branch Library.
New York Public Library Jefferson Market Branch 425 Sixth Avenue (at West 10th Street ) For library hours, call (212) 243-4334
4/7/09
Dawn Potter Receives Fellowship
Attention should be given to the work of Dawn Potter. Dawn recently received a poetry grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation of Langley, Washington, a private foundation that supports writers.
Dawn is also associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire, where she works alongside former Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser.
Living in Harmony, Maine, Dawn makes her living as a free-lance book editor, and teaches creative writing. She can be found at the mainearts.maine.gov Arts Commission Directory of Maine Artists.
Recent writing includes a Milton memoir, "Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton" due out from the University of Massachusetts Press in May 2009.
Also of note, a series of essays about books that she has reread many times. So far they deal with Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Austen's "Mansfield Park," Bronte's "Shirley," Dickens's "David Copperfield," as well as some related essays and reviews that deal with storytelling, character, the sonnet form, etc. Several have or will appear in Sewanee and Threepenny, and a British journal called The Reader has also expressed interest.
Her first book, "Boy Land & Other Poems," is available at local bookstores in Maine, such as Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick and Longfellow Books in Portland.
Howard Levy had this to say about "Boy Land & Other Poems." "One of the most difficult things in poetry is to control the "I," to let it stay innocent, to let it act and be acted upon freshly in the poem. Dawn Potter manages this difficult trick with ease. In her poems, no matter where she is, the consciousness is always fresh, the perceptions always immediate and the human connections always moving, moving us, as we are by the moments of life coming into focus, newly seen and absolutely clear."
In 2010 Dawn will have a collection published by CavanKerry Press.
4/6/09
The Poetry of Living into Nonviolence
L.R. Berger recently visited Camden, New Jersey for an event with a Peace Community there. L.R. does many good things for peace and she gives wonderful readings. "The Unexpected Aviary" was well received. Thank you Cassie MacDonald. Thank you LR.
"Remembering Who We Are: The Poetry of Living into Nonviolence." This gathering (will be) was an opportunity to taste and see. If violence is, as John Dear has said, “forgetting who we are,” nonviolence is a means for “re-membering” who and whose we are. We’ll deploy poems and stories and gesture to ground ourselves in the power and grace at the heart of creative, active, spirit-centered nonviolent being and doing. LR Berger works as NE Associate of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service as educator, poet, and counselor working with victims and perpetrators of violence through Restorative Practices. She is an advocate for the arts as means for social and personal transformation. Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service works around the world offering nonviolence education and information programs. The Peace Community in Camden is part of this church community.
L.R. Berger, author of "The Unexpected Aviary," won the 2003 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her book has been reviewed in Field and Pleiades. L. R. Berger's work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award, The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, The Appalachia Poetry Prize, The Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook.
Berger writes of her poems, "The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love. "
Below, L.R. pictured in Camden's Sacred Heart. L.R. Berger is the New England Associate of Pace e Bene.
4/2/09
The Last Island goes to NC
Mimi White has read in Asheville, North Carolina, and had an interview on the radio last Sunday, (3/29) I believe, and you can listen or download the stream for that show here, at http://wpvm.org/nav/archives, click on this post title, then go to the bottom of the page and find the Wordplay stream. (wordstream.m3u)
Mimi White as been teaching creative writing for twenty-five years as a member of the faculty at the University of New Hampshire, Northern Essex Community College, and Lesley University. She was Co-Director of PicturePoets of AIR, a non-profit organization that provides enriching arts and cultural experiences to teenage girls. She has been a finalist and a recipient of a NH State Fellowship in Poetry. Her chapbook "The Singed Horizon" was selected by Robert Creeley as the recipient of the 2000 Philbrick Poetry Award. Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire 2005-2007, she is currently working to reduce the effects of global warming as a member of Rye, New Hampshire’s Energy Committee.
Mimi's book, 'The Last Island," was reviewed here last summer.
3/30/09
April Prayer by Stuart Kestenbaum to be Read on The Writer's Almanac, April 5, 2009
News for this Monday • April Prayer by Stuart Kestenbaum to be Read on The Writer's Almanac, April 5, 2009
"April Prayer," a poem from "Prayers and Run-on Sentences" by Stuart Kestenbaum (Deerbrook Editions 2007), will be read on The Writer's Almanac, April 5th, 2009. That is a Sunday, so I am not sure when that will air here in Maine, but it is good news just the same.
April Prayer
by Stuart Kestenbaum
Just before the green begins there is the hint of green
a blush of color, and the red buds thicken
the ends of the maple’s branches and everything
is poised before the start of a new world,
which is really the same world
just moving forward from bud
to flower to blossom to fruit
to harvest to sweet sleep, and the roots
await the next signal, every signal
every call a miracle and the switchboard
is lighting up and the operators are
standing by in the pledge drive we’ve
all been listening to: Go make the call.
And it is that time, the buds are swelling, thank you Garrison Keillor.
I am reminded of a song sung Ry Cooder, "Jesus is on that Main Line."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
