Erik Noonan, Christina Fisher, Justin Ready - Thursday, August 6, 7:30pm

Dear Friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams Ave.) Thursday, August 6th at 7:30 pm for poems and music. Smorg is pleased to host San Francisco poets Erik Noonan and Christina Fisher, and local musician Justin Ready - guitarist and lead vocalist for Portland's own Pigeons.

Festivities underway at 7:30 pm.

Food, beer, wine and espresso all available at The Waypost.

See you there!

Sincerely,
Smorg

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Christina Fisher lives in San Francisco. Growing up in Florida she fell in love with the siren call of the manatee named Poetry which ushered her to the West. After a stint in Portland she came down to enroll in the now defunct Poetics Program at New College. She worked closely with poet Lawrence Fixel helping to organize his papers and as a result befriended him and his wife Justine. She's currently at work on an ongoing project involving further publication of Fixel's work and will likely never leave the city unless somebody buys her a villa on an island off Italy. Books include Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder (Red Ant Press) and Maybe, a Painter (Auguste Press).

ERIK NOONAN was born in Los Angeles in 1974. He lives in San Francisco.

Justin Ready lives in Portland, Oregon. He plays guitar and sings lead in the band Pigeons.

Poems - Tichy and Szymaszek

Nui Sam

On the steps of the pagoda
A man was begging

A man with no eyes was begging
On the steps of the pagoda

It might be fire it looks like that
It might be Willy Peter

A smooth tight kind of burning
To the bone it might be that

Someone had drawn red circles
Maybe he had drawn them

Someone had drawn red circles
Where his eyes would be

It might be lipstick it looks like that
It might be red lipstick

They make a place to look
When you are looking

A place to put your eyes
It might be that

- Susan Tichy


from Hart Island

Island of one

million unvisited

policy named for

its organ shape defunct

missile silo lunatic

shoe compost TB

limb box Academy

Award winner un-

identified East Village

apartment dividend

soft body area

by 25 years

- Stacy Szymaszek

Susan Tichy & Stacy Szymaszek, Tuesday, June 30th, 7:30 pm

Dear poets and friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams Ave., PDX) at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, June 30th for a special evening with Susan Tichy and Stacy Szymaszek. An alignment of stars to have these two poets in town on the same evening!

Food, beer, wine and espresso all available at The Waypost.

This reading sponsored by Ninkasi.

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Smorg

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Susan Tichy’s most recent book, Bone Pagoda (Ahsahta Press, 2007), is an extended meditation on Vietnam—the country, the war, and the moral catastrophe signified by this word in American memory. It is underwritten by her experience as a war protester and as the wife of a combat veteran. Her poems have appeared widely in the US and Britain, and have been recognized by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous awards. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at George Mason University in Virginia, and otherwise makes her home in a ghost town in the Colorado Rockies. Her fourth book, Gallowglass, will be out from Ahsahta in 2010.


Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All Ships (Litmus Press, 2005), Hyperglossia (Litmus Press, 2009) as well as many chapbooks, most recently Orizaba: A Voyage With Hart Crane (Faux, 2008). A limited edition letterpress chapbook, from Hart Island is forthcoming from Albion Books. She is the editor of Gam and the Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

Koeneke and Fisher

Rodney



benjamin friedlander

So now we can recognize
by a bend in the photographic emulsion trail when you shimmy
how old your neutrino oscillations are

and how they occur
against your small mass
as novel long-range American radio forces
bring you dispersion and sleep

hang up the empire,
frag its best students—
every vertical Sicily calls on you

to ease the live protons
in trucks for quick movement
a century's casings
spent on your holiday boots.





Dan

BETWEEN INNINGS

FOR BILL LUOMA

I’ll trade you my Willie McGee

for your Gary Templeton

they don’t necessarily have to be about baseball

but the crack of the bat made me think

I could write a novel

hope springs eternal

lost in the sun

can we keep our beloved in the area

the pop up we get our dreams from

Cheyenne Mize will you marry me

to dive in the outfield

I’m down on one knee

do you mind making that 3 hotdogs

on the verge of a shutout

this is baseball it’s impossible to shut out the world

especially on the way in the stadium

bringing the heat today I yelled

this is our year

let the idiots stay home

Dan Fisher & Rodney Koeneke, Saturday, April 11th, 7:30 pm

Dear Smorgies,

Please come out to The Waypost, 3120 N. Williams Ave., PDX, Saturday, April 11th at 7:30 pm to hear beautiful poems from Dan Fisher and Rodney Koeneke. This is Dan Fisher's first trip to Portland. Rodney Koeneke's new chapbook, Rules for Drinking Forties, will be launched!

Food, wine, beer and espresso all available at The Waypost.

See you there.

Sincerely,
Smorg

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Dan Fisher lives on the island in the East Bay. An island that has 4 bridges and a tunnel. He makes poems and some of them have appeared in Bay Poetics, Viz, Work, Cricket Online Review, Lament, and some other places too. He also makes collages under the name Fish Fishtofferson. He works for Upward Bound at Mills College in Oakland. He's never been to Portland.

RODNEY KOENEKE is the author of the poetry collections Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). A new chapbook, Rules for Drinking Forties, is just out from Cy Press. His poems have been included in Abraham Lincoln, Jacket, New American Writing, ZYZZYVA, and other publications, and in the anthologies Bay Poetics and the Flarf primer due out this fall. He lives in Portland, where he curates the Tangent Reading Series with poets Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff. This reading will be the Portland launch for Rules for Drinking Forties.

Peaches and Bats Photos

Sam Lohmann

David Abel

Kaia Sand

Jesse and Sam

Fans

Open Mic and Lecture - Thursday, February 12th 8pm

Dear Portland,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams) this Thursday, February 12th at 8pm for:

SMORG OPEN MIC POETRY PLUS LIVE JOURNALISM & EXPERTS
Come read and hear poetry with the loose theme of "DOPPELGÄNGERS".
And witness Master Presenter Brian Manning's lecture,
"The Split Self: An investigation into the mysterious nature of Doppelgängers, doubles, and the other you."

Food, beer, wine and espresso all available at The Waypost.

See you there!

http://www.thewaypost.com
http://www.smorgreadingseries.blogspot.com

Peaches and Bats Reading Release! with David Abel, Joseph Bradshaw, Kaia Sand and Sam Lohmann

Dear friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N Williams Ave.) Friday, January 30th at 7pm to celebrate the release of a new issue of Peaches and Bats. Smorg is pleased to host David Abel, Joseph Bradshaw, Kaia Sand and Sam Lohmann, founder and editor of Peaches and Bats.

There will be music by Warren Lee (harmonium), Ian Ackerman (violin) and Gabriel Will (viola).

Festivities underway at 7pm.

Please come out and support these wonderful Portland poets!

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David Abel has the most extraordinary air of self-satisfaction. Yet, if we stop to examine those Chinese writings of his that he so presumptuously scatters about the place, we find that they are full of imperfections. Someone who makes such an effort to be different from others is bound to fall in people's esteem, and I can only think that his future will be a hard one. He is a gifted man, to be sure. Yet, if one gives free rein to one's emotions even under the most inappropriate circumstances, if one has to sample each interesting thing that comes along, people are bound to regard one as frivolous. And how can things turn out well for such a man?

Joseph Bradshaw eats chicken and horses in Portland when he's not teaching the world to sing at Portland State University or Pacific Northwest College of Art or writing his famous chapbooks such as The Way Birds Become (Weather Press) and This Ocean, or Oppen Series (Cannibal Books).

Kaia Sand is the author of the poetry collection interval (Edge Books, 2004), the wee book lotto, the chapbooks Heart on a Tripod and tiny arctic ice (all from Dusie), and The NAFTA (forthcoming from Duration Press echap series). Jim Dine created artist books from tiny arctic ice and lotto (Steidl, 2008), and Sand coauthored Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press, 2008) with Jules Boykoff.

Sam Lohmann is a poet, editor, letterpress printer, ex-busboy, future substitute preschool teacher, occasional tutor and temporary cashier in Portland, Oregon. He will be reading work written by others for his yearly zine, "Peaches and Bats."

Gabriel Will and Ian Ackerman (Olympia), and Warren Lee (Portland) play long-tone music in just intonation. In 2007, they completed a recording residency at the Satsop Nuclear Cooling Tower in Elma, WA. In 2009, they had a "Super Weekend."

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Food, beer, wine and espresso all available at The Waypost.

See you there,
Smorg

http://www.smorgreadingseries.blogspot.com
http://www.thewaypost.com