Kiss Me Like You Voted: Election Night Open Mic

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, wrote the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821 in the essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” By this, he meant that poetry reflects the real world and that the poet’s imagination is the faculty  which allows us to perceive beauty in the world–thereby helping create civilization itself. Poets are makers of civilization, no less–hence, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

With this in mind, we invite you to the Election Day installment of the Second Tuesday Poetry series. The November 8 reading is a virtual open mic around the questions: How do we reckon the promise of this country with its violent past and present? How can we love when so much is on the line? How can we NOT love?

Open mic 15 poets max; 3 minutes per person–sign up to read at https://forms.gle/izdLKgzryo1uFzwLA

RSVP for Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYscOqhpjgrGNZ9calCIAyo_9KPb7XWmAy_

 

MoSt Poetry Book Club

Monday, November 21, 2022     6:30-7:30 p.m.     

Stanislaus County Library Makerspace    1500 I Street, Modesto

 The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón

Join host Gary Thomas for a discussion of The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.  Limón is also the host of the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown.  Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, is out now from Milkweed Editions.  She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States.

5 copies of the book are available (while they last) to check out at the Modesto Library (1500 I Street.).

 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. 

 “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.  “I am the hurting kind.”  What does it mean to be the hurting kind?  To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?  To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

“Ada Limón’s sixth and latest collection is a testament to the power of sensitivity. As with her previous award-winning books, The Carrying and Bright Dead Things, these poems are acutely aware of the natural world. And Limón has a knack for acknowledging nature’s little mysteries in order to fully capture its history and abundance. For her, evidence of poetry is everywhere. She connects big ideas – fear, isolation, even death – with little details, like field sparrows, a box of matches or “the body moving / freely.” Above all, The Hurting Kind asks for our attention to stay tender.” NPR, Books We Love

“”Poetry readers have come to expect greatness from Limón, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the National Book Award, and that is exactly what the author offers in The Hurting Kind. . . . My most brief statement on the quality of this collection is this: If you have space to teach just one book of poetry, make it The Hurting Kind. . . . What Limón manages with The Hurting Kind is rare; the poems are at once highly specific and yet broadly relatable, both technically masterful and easily comprehensible. In sum, this collection works equally well for both the avid poetry enthusiast and the reluctant reader. If I was going to try and convince someone that poetry is our most important verbal art, I would start with The Hurting Kind. . . . The Hurting Kind is a collection that begs to be shared, and one that will inevitably show signs of wear as readers carry it with them for weeks at a time.”—The Poetry Question

 

Carnegie Poetry on Saturday Series 2:00 p.m. November 19, 2022 featuring Bryan Medina & Linda Scheller

Please join us Saturday, November 19, 2022 at Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock, CA  from 2:00-3:00 p.m. for a poetry reading by Bryan Medina and Linda Scheller with an open mic following the featured poets. This event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be provided.

        S. Bryan Medina is a former student of U. S. poet laureate emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera, and his poetry has graced stages in the San Francisco BayArea, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. He founded both the Inner Ear Open Mic and the Beat Down  Slam as a way to free poetry from the confines of academic institutions, making it accessible to all. Medina, a long-time art activist, has been awarded two City of Fresno Commendations, including the 2014 Fresno Arts Council Horizon Award, for contributions to the rich artistic and cultural heritage in Fresno. He is the author of More than Soil, Less than Sand and his work has appeared in journals such as Flies, Cockroaches, and Poets, In the Grove, The San Joaquin Review, Jubilee, and Invisible Memoirs, among others. In 2017 Medina was named Fresno County’s third Poet Laureate, serving a distinguished two-year term reaching out to the community featuring readings, school and university visits, writing workshops, and meetings with business and political leaders throughout the state of California.  Medina is a Desert Storm/Gulf War veteran and a graduate of Fresno Pacific University.
        Linda Scheller is a retired public elementary school teacher and the author of two books of poetry, Fierce
Light (FutureCycle Press, 2017) and Wind & Children (Main Street Rag, 2022) as well as a chapbook, Halcyon. Her poetry, plays, and book reviews are widely published in journals and anthologies including Colorado Review, Arkana, Gyroscope Review, Plays, On the Seawall, Sugar House Review, Poetry East, and The Wild Word. She volunteers as a programmer for KCBP Community Radio, tutors adults in literacy and English language acquisition, and serves on the boards of MoSt Poetry and the Stanislaus County Arts Council. Ms. Scheller is a member of the Modesto Chapter of the National League of American Pen Women and sings with Modesto Symphony Orchestra Chorus. Her website is lindascheller.com.

Second Tuesday Poetry Online featuring Cyrus Cassells & James Fujinami Moore

Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday Poetry Online featuring Cyrus Cassells and James Fujinami Moore 

Join us as we welcome two tremendous poets to our Second Tuesday Poetry series: State of Texas Poet Laureate Cyrus Cassells and James Fujinami Moore of Los Angeles. Both have new collections published by Four Way Books. We’re pleased to welcome these poets to our Central Valley poetry community.  Open mic follows featured poets, 3 min per poet, please. Sign up for open mic.

Hosted by Stella Beratlis
Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2022
Time: 7:00 pm PST
RSVP for Zoom link

Cyrus Cassells

A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Cyrus Cassells has also been a recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Lannan Literary Award. His first book, The Mud Actor, was a 1981 National Poetry Series Selection. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award, and the Balcones Poetry Prize. His Catalan translations, Still Life With Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. He was nominated for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for his cultural criticism for The Washington Spectator. My Gingerbread Shakespeare, his first novel, and his seventh book of poems, Is There Room For Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? were published in 2021. In 2021, he was appointed Texas poet laureate, and in 2022, Cassells received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and his eighth collection The World That the Shooter Left Us was published by Four Way Press. He lives in Austin and is a tenured full professor at Texas State University.

About The World That the Shooter Left Us

“Wrestling in the clutches of fury and mourning, Cassells—long a master purveyor of both the splendor and contradictions of the natural world, as well as the voluptuary elements of the self—turns his consummate clear-eyed gaze to a bleak and burgeoning brutality that threatens our days, siphons the spirit and challenges the realm of the poet. The World the Shooter Left Us is a world defined by stark boundaries and firepower, chalk outlines, rampant injustices and histories tainted with each and every version of sin. Cassells, a wily and relentless witness, doesn’t tiptoe through the maelstrom or allow the reader to turn away. Instead, he becomes the writer that this moment needs—one with the lyrical skill and decades of experience to craft this revelatory guidebook for our grief.” —Patricia Smith 

“The World That the Shooter Left Us is poetry of conscience at its most crafted and compassionate. The title poem is an elegy for a beloved Latino lawyer, murdered by a white assailant over a parking space, that forces us to contemplate all we have lost in a society bristling with guns, rage and bigotry. However, the title of another poem captures the essence of this eloquent collection: “The Only Way to Fight the Plague is Decency.” In the face of plague after plague—COVID-19, lethal police violence, kids in cages, the end of asylum, sexual exploitation, Trumpism—these poems show us a way out, a vision of transcendence through reclamation of our humanity. Cyrus Cassells demonstrates, through the resplendent decency of these poems, that the world the shooter left us is not only a world of death, but life, not only bullets, but poetry.”
–Martin Espada

 

James Fujinami Moore

James Fujinami Moore’s debut collection indecent hours was published by Four Way Books in 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street’s 4×2, The Brooklyn Rail, Guesthouse, The Margins, the Pacifica Literary Review, and Prelude. He has been a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, a Bread Loaf Work-Study Fellow, and the Four Way Books Fellow at the Frost Place Conference in Poetry. He received his MFA from Hunter College in 2016, and lives in Los Angeles.

About indecent hours

“James Fujinami Moore’s powerful poems keep intimacy active in their measure and perspectives, working through a wide range of public and private histories. They close in and zoom out with an intensity of tonal scale, one that binds an elegance steeped in experience with all the irreducible cuts and marks the poems invoke and depict. Those cuts and marks may be rendered with a surrealist’s touch or a realist’s blunt recall, as needed, and with a precise understanding of the various physical and emotive overlapping roles the glimpse, the conversation, the story, the touch, and the brawl each retain. indecent hours is a terrific book.”  -Anselm Berrigan

“James Fujinami Moore’s poems possess the uncanny capacity to be at once unsettled and unnervingly lucid. It is this particular power that fuels his searing investigations—into the intimate relationships between representation and violence, into how families and countries take shape around those who are missing. Moore’s poems are urgent, achingly searching, unflinching. Here is a poet who moves as he needs to—flipping foreground and background, rewinding and replaying, refusing the distortions of fear.”  –Mary Syzbist 

 

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcvduuqqD4rGdz7w9BSPEysavrDAG4cdbBq
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

MoSt Poetry Workshop with Kai Coggin

Award-winning poet Kai Coggin will facilitate a Zoom workshop and read her poetry Saturday, October 1, 2022 from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PT.

$20 per person; please register at https://mostfall2022.eventbrite.com
to receive Zoom link.

Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021) and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council and Arkansas Learning Through the Arts, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.

Recently  awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award, named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated as Hot Springs Woman of the Year, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016, 2018, 2021— awarded in 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE,  Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and on the Board of Directors of the International Women’s Writing Guild.

She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.