Smorg

Melissa Benham, Stacy Elaine Dacheux, Noel Tendick! Monday, July 18 7pm

2011-07-08T12:36:00.000-07:00

Smorg hosts Poetry on the Piazza!

Monday, July 18th at 7pm, Smorg is overly excited to welcome Melissa Benham (Oakland, CA) and Stacy Elaine Dacheux (Los Angeles, CA) to Portland, to read with local legend Noel Reverend Blue Sky Tendick. Sure to be a blast!

Breathe the air at Director Park and support the arts!

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Cosponsored by Director Park and the Multnomah Arts Center Literary Arts Program

Director Park is located on SW Park bet. Yamhill and Taylor
(for more information visit directorpark.org or call 503-823-8087)

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Melissa Benham currently lives by the lake in Oakland, CA with her husband, daughter, cats, and fish. Originally from New Jersey, she moved to NYC for a few raucous years, before migrating to San Francisco in 1995. At the advice of Diane di Prima, she moved to Boulder in 2001 to study at Naropa, where she auspiciously met both Stacy Elaine Dacheux and Jesse Morse. In 2003, her first book, Codeswitching was published. After moving back to San Francisco in 2004, she and Chana Morgenstern founded the Artifact Reading Series late one night upon deciding there were just too many terrifically talented young writers who didn’t know much about each other. After 6 years of directing Artifact, Melissa took a break from programming, and will eventually get around to completing her 2^nd book Repronounceable one of these days. This is her first trip to Portland and is totally guilty of putting a bird on it.

Stacy Elaine Dacheux spent half her childhood outside Boston, getting beat on by tough girls. The other half was spent outside Birmingham, getting beat on by Southern Baptists. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she gets beat on by life. She writes articles for Flavorpill with Paris Lia, one of which was mentioned in The New Yorker’s Book Bench. She is also the co-founder of Slack Lust, an online magazine dedicated to cultural investigations. Other publications include: Thuggery & Grace, Versal, and Past Simple. Her short story, “The Sociology of Containers” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Noel Tendick tries to live up to his names, and he's gone by a few. He's gone by a few places too, looking for the edges of ground and water, water and sky, sky and the other side of light, and rarely found it hard to hold gratitude for all the being and non-being of this exacting and transcendent world.

Page Boy Celebration Saturday, June 25th

2011-06-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams Ave., PDX) Saturday, June 25th at 7.30pm to celebrate the latest issue of Seattle-based Page Boy Magazine! Readings by Thomas Walton, Sarah Galvin, Sarah Erickson and Jesse Morse. Watercolor portraits on display by Shannon Perry. And a surprise musical guest.....

Come out and support the arts!

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

Sincerely,
Smorg

Writing: Schomburg, Anderson

2011-06-16T13:22:00.000-07:00

TUNGUSKA EVENT

People have started behaving as if they’ve been destroyed by an asteroid. They’re sleeping on the floor like flattened fiery trees. How can I carve out an exact life from this mess of everyone in the world’s days? I cannot even seem to make a dinner with the ingredients in this cupboard in this kitchen disemboweled and on its side in this forest in central Siberia. I’ll look at anything just to avert my eyes.

- Zachary Schomburg

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The new Bible won’t end

even if, in the end, we fill it

with dead insects, old photos, dust.

I’m writing

you from a yellow place, where I’m composing

a lovesong to orange.

Much as, in the original,

David wrote a lovesong to Goliath (expunged).

This is and isn’t true.

There are no oranges in the Bible.

- Erik Anderson

Zachary Schomburg, Richard Froude and Erik Anderson! Saturday, May 21 7.30pm

2011-03-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams Ave., PDX) Saturday, May 21st for a smashing night of poetry. Local poet Zachary Schomburg will read with Coloradans Erik Anderson and Richard Froude, in town for one night only. Come out and support the arts!

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

Festivities begin at 7.30pm.

Hope to see you there!

Wishes,
Smorg

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Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009) and The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.

Richard Froude was born in London, grew up in Bristol and moved to the US in 2002. He is most recently the author of FABRIC, published by Horse Less Press. New writing can be found in Birkensnake, Witness, and forthcoming in Slack Lust. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Erik Anderson's The Poetics of Trespass was published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions in 2010. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Naropa University and, with Richard Froude and Anne Waldman, co-edits the magazine Thuggery & Grace.

Writing from Frey, Wayne and Maziar

2011-03-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

from SORROW ARROW

The second to last train stop overlooks a metal yard

A lot of people are eating

In the movie we're graceful, less monotonous

We're not bunched up against the present

The sign at the church says heaven's got an edge

I don't want my donut

There's that picture book about the steam shovel that keeps digging

Old-fashioned nostalgia for a machine that works

My zone opens

I'll keep several appointments with a gaping zone

Then lob my machines into the cold, swollen river

Emily Kendal Frey

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Poem

sounds like we’re stopping a party along its glitter track

this transcriptionist is bird shaped

behind a door of neon-like light

a cabinet of speech

it’s my new dress

patterned as a beast might

the heat comes on, the roof is a reserve

we work our way into the archive

and the particular paper adheres

to a green glow, purple text with silver thread

I walk a small circumference

where the city starts to reopen

dry notes rain down with the cottonwood

Phoebe Wayne

--------

Magick

Come where you can hear
the traffic light change
from lime to carmine
so small
disentangle me
fly me away
what you say
many moonlit times

Paul Maziar

Emily Kendal Frey, Phoebe Wayne & Paul G. Maziar! Sunday, Feb 20th 7:30 p.m.

2011-01-31T16:01:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

Please come out to the Waypost at 3120 N. Williams Ave, PDX for a night of Portland poetry. Smorg is delighted to host Emily Kendal Frey, Phoebe Wayne and Paul G. Maziar, three poets that call Portland home. Festivities begin around 7:30. Come out and support the arts!

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

See you there!

Wishes,
Smorg

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Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009), FRANCES (Poor Claudia 2010), and THE NEW PLANET (Mindmade Books 2010) as well as three chapbook collaborations. Her first full-length collection, THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE, was just published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Phoebe Wayne is the author of a chapbook called Lovejoy (c_L press), which is part research project, part text collage, and part reflection, all revolving around a 20th century historical drama involving some public artworks in Northwest Portland. Some of her other recent work is in the magazines Foursquare, With + Stand, and Peaches and Bats. She lives in Portland and works in the children's department of a public library.

Paul G. Maziar is a writer & poet, and bell-hop, living in Portland OR, via NYC via L.A. via Vegas. His first book, What it is: What it is, was a collaboration of his early prose works along with the typographic & photographic designs of the artist Matt Maust, published in 2008. In 2010, Paul self-published his first chapbook of poems, Last Light of Day, which is being brought out as a full-length collection by Publication Studio in Portland. Currently, he curates a monthly reading, art & music series in Portland called The Switch, and is studying under the poet Hoa Nguyen. His work has been published in ListenLight, Poets & Artists, and he's the co-creator of an ongoing poetry blog called Don’t Fog the Feelers.

Eileen Myles - Sunday, September 19th 7:30pm

2010-08-23T20:23:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Please come out to The Waypost to see renowned poet Eileen Myles read from her new poet's novel, Inferno. Smorg is extremely excited to host this event. Sunday, September 19th, 7:30 pm.

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

See you there!

Smorg

Eileen Myles will be reading from Inferno (a poet’s novel) which chronicles the adventures of a young female writer finding her sex and aesthetics in the last decades of the 20^th C. Eileen’s books of poems include Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree. Her first fiction, Chelsea Girls, appeared in 1994 followed by Cool for You (a nonfiction novel) in 2000. She taught in the writing program at the University of California at San Diego for five years, returning to New York in 2007. Last spring she was the Hugo visiting writer at U.MT, Missoula. Her essays were collected in 2009 in The Importance of Being Iceland for which she won a Warhol/Creative Capital grant.

David Abel and Chris Daniels, Friday May 21, 7pm

2010-05-12T22:42:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams, PDX) for some fine poetry Friday, May 21 with Portland's own David Abel and longtime Bay Area resident Chris Daniels. Daniels' new chapbook porous, nomadic (airfoil) will be available for the first time.

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

Festivities begin at 7pm.

Hope to see you there!

Sincerely,
Smorg

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The perfervidly anti-capitalist, godless, internationalist son of well-known language-artist maestro David Daniels, Chris Daniels was born in NYC in 1956. He dropped out of high school to become a dishwasher and never bothered with college. He worked as a cook and played electric bass guitar for many years. In 1980, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he still lives and, until very recently, sold his labor at a terrible loss. For reasons still unclear to him, he passed the GED and received a high school diploma in 1996.
His books of translation include The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa and The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa, vol. 2 (both published by Shearsman Books; vol. 1 of Campos is forthcoming); On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids by Josely Vianna Baptista (Manifest Press); and an ongoing, fascicular anthology of Lusophone poetry, self-published and -distributed as exceedingly modest chapbooks.

Poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist David Abel moved to Portland in 1997, after tenures in New York City and Albuquerque (where he maintained the Bridge Bookshop, and Passages Bookshop & Gallery, respectively). Also an editor, bookseller, and curator, he frequently collaborates in various capacities with friends far and near. He is a founding member of the Spare Room reading series (www.flim.com/spareroom), now in its ninth year, and the author of various chapbooks and artist’s books, most recently Commonly (airfoil), While You Were In (disposable books), and Twenty- (Crane’s Bill Books). He is the publisher of the Envelope broadside series, and copublisher with Sam Lohmann of airfoil chapbooks.

PageBoy Launch Reading! Thursday, January 28th, 7pm

2010-01-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N Williams Ave, PDX) Thursday, January 28th at 7pm. Smorg is pleased to host a reading to celebrate the release of PageBoy, a fresh new magazine out of Seattle. Editor Thomas Walton will read, along with poets Ryan Newton and Jesse Morse. Possible surprise musical guest.

Support the arts!

Festivities begin at 7pm, give or take.

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

See you there.

Sincerely,
Smorg

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

2009-07-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-16T13:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

Sam Lohmann

David Abel

Kaia Sand

Jesse and Sam

Fans

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

2009-02-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-13T22:03:00.000-08:00

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

The Waypost Open Mic Nite - Thursday, December 11, 7pm

2008-12-09T21:29:00.000-08:00

Smorg is proud to host open mic nite at The Waypost (3120 N Williams Ave.) the second Thursday of every month. December's theme: BICYCLES.

Please come out to read or perform. As Portland remains a national hub for urban bike riding, work pertaining to BICYCLES is encouraged. All work, of course, in any genre, is welcome.

Festivities underway at 7pm.

Hope to see you there.

Smorg #4

2008-12-09T17:59:00.000-08:00

I said: "No Public Art!"
To Faulkner, of course he said: "Architecture

Coliseum jazz, at the middle is architecture
At the entrance, tabacs
buying a newspaper

In black, sat in the jazz hall
And though I said: "No Public Art!"
I put that nickel down upon the mantle
and stood at the vomitorium door
, Soundlessly smoking

Stoned, I hear the vowels more
What is broken, child?
My hand, it hurts
viz. etymological hammering
on the phrases heard
What have you hurt?
My hand, and they all were watching

--- James Yeary (from "Argos 4")

but there is a pigeon in the road too old to fly
and you cant say he is waiting for a wheel bump
or that he is waiting for a ride to the lake
like the white dove we wait
to run more like a mountain, like that sleeping man
always on that bench in the park, more and more always

we live our days wandering around waiting our death
when some hippy will come pour water to our grave
and say some heavy shit
but what if that hippy got too heavy now
like a cpr that got into your heart too far

I saw a man beating my fathers chest to breathing
beating him to life after his first death of many

and I was taken from the home by death
and went to the hospital on the lonely bus

and when the nurse came to take me from the room
I saw his heart meter plunge
and I shall never again doubt the osmosis of emotion

--- Tom Blood (from "The Act")

Tom Blood, Ah Holly Fam'ly, Galveston, Dracula inna Spaceship

2008-12-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends,

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N. Williams Ave. PDX, OR) this Friday, December 5th at 7pm for poetry and performance.

Tom Blood's the sky position won the 2007 William Stafford/Donald Hall Oregon Book Award for Poetry. If Ever Then Always, a book of romantic poems, co-written with Curtis Knapp from 1997-1999, is now also available from Marriage Records Press. Praise for Blood's the sky position: "In his author's note, Tom Blood avers that these remarkable poems "were written while staring out a window." Clearly, if ever there was a magic casement, it is Blood's. Here, perception becomes a beautiful act of absolute sympathy and attention a continuous evidence of perfect compassion. Never once does Blood diminish or deform his subjects. Rather, he puts his syntax and his self entirely at the service of their well-beloved motion. These are poems for the world, in all its wildness, in all its nearness."
-Donald Revell

Ah Holly Fam'ly 7 or 8 piece Stoner-Calypso Featuring members of Saw Whet, Ohioan, and Au. Their CD "Your Body will Become an Anchor" is occasionally available.

Galveston NW-centered folk influenced by Ecuadorian Black Metal

Dracula inna Spaceship Circuit-bent dub + poetry. Mixture of homemade electronics and literature.

Festivities underway at 7pm. These acts have been procured by the indefatigable local poet James Yeary, who leaves shortly thereafter for Alaska. Please come out and support the arts!

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

Sincerely,
Smorg

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

P.S. The Waypost's open mike, hosted by Smorg, occurs the second Thursday of every month. December 11th. December's theme = Bicycles.

The Waypost Open Mic Nite - Thursday, November 13, 7pm

2008-11-03T17:46:00.000-08:00

Smorg is proud to host open mic nite at The Waypost (3120 N Williams Ave.) the second Thursday of every month. November's theme: RAIN.

Please come out to read or perform. As the long winter begins its ascent, work pertaining to RAIN is encouraged. All work, of any genre, is welcome.

Festivities underway at 7pm.

Hope to see you there.

Walton / Froude Bring Down the House

2008-11-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

L and Elms

last night drunk with Lenna
stumbled home like a sailor tearing clouds from the sky
we made love beneath a summer elm
seeds all over us
whorling about, washing us
fracturing us only
to gather us into windrows again
into alleys, curbs, doorways then up again
into the mauve city sky where I am still
and think I like it here
though it’s day now and
there’s a thousand things I should be doing

--- Thomas Walton

From the drugstore, I take band-aids and a dark t-shirt with Denver written across the chest. The letters are superimposed over a grouping of straight and jagged lines that I presume to represent the city and mountains. The band-aids offer breathable protection and a non stick pad. The swerve and block design of their packaging is a trademark of the manufacturer, a dated conglomerate who decades ago tried to patent the stomach pump. I take these things so that our lives might perfectly and completely reflect this work.

I do not have a song to sing, nor can I remember the words to yours. Instead, I have burned these initials into my arm so we can sleep side by side in the museum. Of course, reflection is improbable but by noting these correlations we intimate entry into a new chamber, one in which the walls are built of curved mirrors. Most important is the warp created by this curvature.

So, it is a work of becoming?

It is a work of straight and jagged lines onto which language is superimposed. The chamber does not exist in the original pattern but in the curvature that language affords. Such was the response of the patent office. Such is the story of the drugstore.

--- Richard Froude

October 12th, 2008 - Richard Froude, Thomas Walton - 2pm

2008-09-25T14:35:00.000-07:00

Please come out to The Waypost (3120 N Williams Ave., Portland, OR) Sunday October, 12th at 2pm for brunch and poetry. A poetry church of sorts! With the exquisite Thomas Walton and Richard Froude. Smorg returns after enjoying the summer off.

Richard Froude was born in London and raised in the Westcountry. He’s lived in the US since 2002 and is the author of Tarnished Mirrors (Muffled Cry 2004), The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy (Catfish 2007), the forthcoming On Movement from Minus House Press and The History of Zero available any day now from Candle Aria Press. Work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, most recently Hangman, The Diagram, Word for Word, Parcel and the anthology 31 Words. He edits the journal Thuggery and Grace with poets Erik Anderson and Anne Waldman, and the occasional publication Pop Séance with Anderson, Jesse Morse and Ryan Newton. He teaches creative writing at Denver’s Steele Elementary School and the University of Denver where he is working towards a PhD.

Thomas Walton is a Seattle poet from Corson's Inlet, Brest. He has been published in numerous magazines and journals including The I Want You To Do Me Too Review, Bored With Me Quarterly, and The I'm Semi-Hard Bi-Weekly. He has been writing serious poetry for about three weeks.

Hope to see you there...

Portland Haiku Club an Intimate Success

2008-09-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

The haikus, held together, built a wonderful postal collage. The members met for the first time. All haikus continue to be sent anonymously...

caught between
what occurs - what's been worked
arrowhead or stone

The pivot transforms
disease into grey snake skin
crumpled in the sand

Ants clinging fast to
Cottonwood fluff parachutes
Walking back for days

overheard fight:
"I don't need advice.
The only advice I'll take
is from millionaires."

we're biding our ways
and then life reveals itself
quick now, shoot the gap

Smorg #2 - Portland Haiku Club - 6/21/08

2008-06-05T15:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Portland,

Please come out and join the Portland Haiku Club in reading your own or other favorite haikus. The half-anonymous members of the Portland Haiku Club have been composing one haiku a day for months now, and mailing them off to each other surreptitiously, in extremely creative fashion. The members have never met.

As with Smorg #1 (an intimate success), the reading will be held at The Waypost, a community-conscious coffee and ale house, 3120 N Williams Ave., Portland OR, USA. Saturday, June 21st. 7:30pm.

Bring haikus and friends.

(A possible sweet party to follow.)

Cheers!

p.s. The beautiful author photos of Ryan Newton, Patrick Dunagan and Jacqueline Motzer you see below (from Smorg #1) should have been, and now are, credited to Carlos Alcibar.

Smorg #1

2008-05-03T18:34:00.000-07:00

READING "JAMES SCHUYLER'S PASTORAL POETICS"

The best things about you are innocent wrongs

once leaning against a stool

a firm patience that doesn't outtalk itself

long walks when wetness left us

"kindergarten" drinks together

all night poetry every night

living together even when we never have

or will knowing what it feels like

waking to have a cup of coffee

San Francisco Manhattan Portland Los Angeles

cities in our shared blood

once I pour out everything I have and everything

you are is so natural this artifice

where no one is lied to

we each recognize there is this between us

an easy come and go of affection

wafts of fog about bright moon-lit building-tops

lack of perfect grace pushed further out as the years come

being you is the reward of poetry the you

& you know me as you are red or pale fading

re-affirming coming on strong or quietly

a belt on a pair of jeans longing rides upon

- Patrick James Dunagan

HERE AS BREATHY NERVE

Slowly past this reader you read
and as you lightly perplex a perplexity lines from me
all the read lines perplexed planted

and in your plant i rave, here
have rolled a raving
have blued the roll and blessed
living its linear and planted blue
its blessing to black so raving and rolled.

Now morphing into this blue living
black to your morphosis, your blessed variant
I vary for you faring
so that we living could reach black fare
at the morphous reaches I breathe various
our breath fair and reaching
by the wish
our whorls wishing – whorling

Now, here as breathy nerve and feeling
nerve this pitch
I feel almost wished to
pitch from your slippage you have slipped me
and from my count I have counted you whorled

-- Jacqueline Motzer

Comanche X
for Rita

Think I’ll try and
make way through wooden veins
what’s left of today

frayed denim an
oozing
leak in the rear differential

snow drift
crystal foot powder
tiffany comfort

when under the microscope
clearer intentions
bubble up

brain waves
transect
predator prey populations

I would like to be
Redd Foxx
if only

to remain
perilously on top
of the Situation

- Ryan Newton

Smorg #2 will be held in late May or June. Stay Tuned!

April 12th - Patrick James Dunagan, Jackie Motzer, Ryan Newton

2008-03-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

Dear Portland,

Welcome to SMORG, a reading series/journal collaborative hosted by myself, Jesse Morse, and the exquisite Jeff Butler. Please come out to our inaugural reading, April 12th at 7:30, with poets Jackie Motzer, Ryan Newton and Patrick James Dunagan. The reading will be at The Waypost, 3120 N Williams Ave., an intimate and supportive coffee ale house.

This is Jackie Motzer's first Portland reading. Raised and undergrad-ed in Southern Ohio, she studied Poetics at the New College of California earning an M.F.A. in 2003. She was the featured poet in the debut issue of Ellipsis magazine. Her first book, The Nymph Poem, is forthcoming from Snag Press this spring. Today is her mother's birthday.

Ryan Newton has spent the last year living near Cincinnati, Ohio, working as a bookseller. Prior to that, the author lived in San Francisco, where he studied at New College, within the now defunct Poetics program. Along with poets Richard Froude, Jesse Morse, and Erik Anderson, he is a rotating editor and contributor to the low fi publication Pop Seance.

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at the library of USF. Poems and book reviews have appeared in Artvoice (Buffalo), Blue Book, Cannibal, Chain, Galatea Ressurects, Jacket, One Less Magazine, Pompom, St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Chapbooks include: After the Sinews (Auguste, SF, CA) and Fess Parker (Red Ant, Portland, OR).

Hope to see you there . . .