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 . . .