Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center

Book Discussion: Lee Herrick's Scar & Flower
2023-01-23 18:30 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Join us at the Modesto Library to discuss Lee’s collection Scar and Flower. Copies available at the service desk at the downtown library. You don’t need to have read the book to join us!

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2023-04-24 17:30 - 18:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
MoSt Poetry Book Club will meet at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 24 in person at the downtown Modesto library. We’ll be reading Katie Farris’ book Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, available at the library reference desk to borrow after April 4th.

July Book Club: FELON by Reginald Dwayne Betts
2023-07-24 17:30 - 18:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Please join at the Modesto Library to discuss Felon: Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Copies of the book are available at the check-out desk of the Modesto Library, courtesy of Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center. Facilitated by Tina Marie Curiel-Vega.

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2023-11-13 18:30 - 19:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
“The late W.S. Merwin might as well have been called Merlin, for the seemingly magical changes of his work during his long career. The poems in Present Company are like impressionist or even abstract paintings. If you scan them quickly, they will seem to be out of focus, but if you read more slowly, stopping and lingering, your patience will be rewarded by their beauty.”

MoSt Poetry Book Club - Information Desk by Robyn Schiff
2024-02-17 10:00 - 11:00 | BakeShop, 940 Eleventh Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
MoSt Poetry Book Club meets at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 17, 2024 at BakeShop, 11th Street in downtown Modesto to discuss Information Desk by Robyn Schiff. You can pick up a copy of the book at the Stanislaus County Library’s Modesto Branch. Here’s what the publisher, Penguin Random House, has to say:

ABOUT INFORMATION DESK
New York Times Book Review Edtitors’ Choice
“Among the year’s highlights . . . groundbreaking, epic . . . Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art.” —Washington Post
“An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor . . . It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.” —New York Review of Books
A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a writer whose work offers “something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)
Robyn Schiff’s fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.
Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.

MoSt Poetry Book Club
2024-04-22 18:30 - 19:30 | Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Join host Salvatore Salerno for a discussion of The Art of Drowning by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus. MoSt Book Club will meet Monday, April 22, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. in the Maker Space of the Stanislaus County Library, 1500 I Street, Modesto CA. Participants may pick up a free copy of The Art of Drowning at the library reference desk prior to the meeting. This MoSt event is free and open to the public.

Poetry Book Club--Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss
2024-07-27 10:00 - 11:00 | BakeShop, 940 Eleventh Street, Modesto, CA, 95354, United States
Please join us at 10:00 a.m. Saturday, July 27, 2024 at Bakeshop, 940 Eleventh Street in Modesto for MoSt Poetry Book Club. Linda Scheller will facilitate a discussion of Modern Poetry, the latest collection by Diane Seuss. Copies are available at the Modesto Library main desk. You’re always more than welcome to come and enjoy the discussion whether or not you’ve read the book! This event is free and open to the public.
“Diane Seuss’s signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor.” —https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/modern-poetry

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry, including Modern Poetry; frank: sonnets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize; Still Life With Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan.

Poetry Book Club: In Praise of Late Wonder by Lee Herrick
2024-11-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Panera, 2103 McHenry A, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
Join us for the latest edition of the MoSt Poetry Book Club, when we’ll be discussing California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick’s excellent new collection, In Praise of Late Wonder! We’ll meet on Sunday, November 17th, 2024 at 2pm, at Panera Bread, 2103 McHenry Avenue, in Modesto.
In the meantime, pick up a copy of Lee’s book, which is now available at the front desk of the Modesto Library. Tom Portwood will lead a discussion about the collection that afternoon. We look forward to seeing you!

Second Tuesday: Members' Holiday Open Mic & Potluck
2024-12-10 18:00 - 19:30 | The Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto, CA, 95350, United States
The Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center presents Second Tuesday: Members’ Holiday Open Mic and Potluck. Bring a dish to share, and help us celebrate 15 years of bringing poetry to the community through our Second Tuesday series. If you’re not a MoSt member yet, you are warmly encouraged to attend and join us at the door.
On Tuesday, December 10 at the Dragonfly Art for Life, 1210 J Street, Modesto CA 95354.
MoSt Poetry is proud to serve our community with free poetry events, including the Second Tuesday Poetry series, Poetry on Saturdays at the Carnegie Arts Center, Free Summer Poetry Workshops at the Library, New Year’s Poetry Challenge, Poetry Everywhere initiative at Stanislaus County K-12 public schools, and more. Programs we administer or in which we partner include Poetry Out Loud, Aileen Jaffa Youth Poetry Contest, Stanislaus County Youth Poet Laureate, and the City of Modesto’s Poets’ Corner Contest.
On Facebook, Instagram, and Threads: @mostpoetry.
