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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 . . .