One more reminder: tomorrow, Saturday the 11th, is the evening I’ll be readingwith Port Townsend poet and filmmaker Kathryn Hunt. I hope to see you there!
Also at Village Books, at 4:00 p.m., Ann Gerike and Hannah Faith Notess will be reading from their new poetry chapbooks published by Floating Bridge Press. There’ll be time between their reading and ours for conversation, book browsing, and dinner in Fairhaven. Why not make an evening of it?
Village Books
1200 11th Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
(360) 671-2626 www.villagebooks.com
Please join Kathryn Hunt and me for a poetry reading. We’ll be presenting our poems together at Village Booksin Fairhaven (1200 11th St., Bellingham, WA) at 7:00 p.m., Saturday, January 11.
Our reading will be preceded at 4:00 by by a reading with two amazing Floating Bridge Press poets, Ann Gerike and Hannah Faith Notess. Between their reading and ours, there’ll be an hour and a half for conversation, book browsing, and dinner at one of the adjacent cafes. Come for a double-header of poetry double-headers!
Kathryn’s gorgeous collection, Long Way Through Ruin, has been sustaining me through a hectic holiday season. The lyrical meditations and lucid images in her poems are reviving me with a sense of peace. Each poem is akin to a palette of jewel-toned watercolors, bringing beauty and clarity as I read.
Here’s a video of Kathryn reading her luminous poem “Credo”:
CREDO
By Kathryn Hunt
I believe in the shining coins of rain
falling and falling on the garden, the fierce
good luck of that, the garden with its
sated roots, that scent. I believe in the hives
of rooms beneath the soil, insects toiling
in the dark among bones and the dust
of bones. The silvering clouds with their luster
of honey and despair, the young deer
watchful in tall grasses.
I believe in my mother who kept
two sons from war and the Purple Heart
she left in her drawer with her costume
jewelry. I believe in the hallelujah of time passing,
the strangeness of that. The way you
climb out of a dream and walk slowly
back to yourself, something beautiful there.
It moves among us like the wind moves
but is not the wind. It lives in our blood
like fear or love. I believe in the door
left open as the rain begins to fall,
and in the way, no matter what,
we’ll ever know.
Everyone, let me tell you about Kathryn Hunt. She’s a Port Townsend writer and filmmaker whose first collection of poems, Long Way Through Ruin, is out this fall from Blue Begonia Press.
I’m thrilled to get to do a reading with her at Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, on Saturday, January 11, 2014, at 7:00 p.m. If you can get yourself to the upper-left corner of the Lower 48, please come and say hello!
This beautiful video features Kathryn reading her poem “Credo,” as well as a mini-interview with Kathryn about her writing:
Have you ever heard a more gorgeous line than “The silvering clouds with their luster / of honey and despair”?
You can read “Credo,” plus three other of Kathryn’s poems from her collection, here.
In the next couple of months, I get to do three readings with Western-Washington poets. Next spring, I’ll get to do two more, and possibly four. These add up to almost higher than I can count, so I’ve added an “Upcoming Events” page to my blog so that I can keep track of dates during those long intervals during which my little pocket calendar gets lost in the stacks of drafts and manuscripts drifting around on my desks.
Here’s a preview of the three readings coming up soon:
Sunday, December 15: Ish River Poet’s Circle with Jane Alynn (and another poet TBA), Anchor Art Space, 216 Commercial Avenue, Anacortes, WA
Saturday, January 11: Reading with Kathryn Hunt, author of Long Way Through Ruin, at Village Books, 1200 11th Street, Bellingham, WA
Jennifer Bullis 