A New Cadence Poetry Series Presents

William Greenwood

&

Nils Peterson

 

reading from their poetry

Saturday, November 14th @ Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street Santa Cruz, CA 95060(Behind Streetlight Records)

7:30pm Admission is free

 

William Greenwood grew up in California where he studied languages and social sciences, graduating in philosophy in the late 1960's. He joined the farm workers' struggle for justice during early unionization, then organized the first farm worker cooperative in Watsonville. Subsequently, he worked on agricultural and small business projects in Latin America, the Middle East and Central Asia.

During the 1970's in Santa Cruz, he and several local poets and translators co-founded Green Horse Press and operated a letterpress in Neal Coonerty's garage. Green Horse published Into the Center of America and his translation of a selection from Guatemalan poet Arqueles Morales’ La Paz Aún No Ganada, chosen for the 1971 Colección la Honda by Cuba’s Casa De las Américas.  In 2014 Word Temple Press published Landscape/Cityscape.  

Paul Vangelisti: “In Landscape/Cityscape Greenwood resumes his singular, sometimes eccentric explorations, getting at the core of what language may propose for one’s way of living. It is a sensual, hard-bought knowledge that pervades Greenwood’s poetry, founded in and of the world, reinforced by the adventure of language.”

 

 

 

Nils Peterson is Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University where he taught in the English and Humanities Departments.  He has coached and worked with countless writers through workshops and retreats in conjunction with such poets as Robert Bly, William Stafford and Galway Kinnell. In 2009, he was chosen to be the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County.

He has published poetry, science fiction, and articles on subjects as varying as golf and Shakespeare. A chapbook of poems entitled Here Is No Ordinary Rejoicing was published by No Deadlines Press, a collection of poems entitled The Comedy of Desire with an introduction by Robert Bly was published by the Blue Sofa Press, a collection of poems entitled Driving a Herd of Moose to Durango appeared in 2005, For This Day in 2008, and A Walk to the Center of Things in 2011.

“He is an artisan of the ‘keen, clear song.” Joseph Stroud

“This is a book with humor and grace.” Robert Bly

“Nils Peterson’s poems move with depth, authority, and the occasional grace-granting glint of humor.” Jane Hirshfield

 

A New Cadence in October!

A New Cadence Poetry Series Presents

Mong-Lan

&

David Brinks

reading from their poetry

Saturday, October 24th @ Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street Santa Cruz, CA 95060(Behind Streetlight Records)

7:30pm Admission is free

Mong-Lan, Vietnamese-born multi-disciplinary American artist, poet, writer, painter, photographer, dancer and teacher of Argentine tango, singer, left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards for Poetry, and other awards, Mong-Lan’s poetry has been nationally and internationally anthologized to include being in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of eight books and chapbooks which contain her poetry and artwork -- books include Song of the Cicadas (Juniper Prize, finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award); Why is the Edge Always Windy?; Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art; the bilingual Spanish / English edition, Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos; One Thousand Minds Brimming: poems & art; and the chapbooks Love Poem to Tofu and Other Poems and Love Poem to Ginger & Other Poems: poetry & paintings. Her book Force of the Heart: Tango, Art, which includes drawings, paintings, and a poem, was inspired by the tango.

David Brinks is a long-time resident of New Orleans’ historic French Quarter (Vieux Carré), Brinks is a poet, historian, editor, publisher, arts curator and educator. His family dates back more than seven generations in the region. His mother’s family is Acadian French and Houma Indian. His father’s family is Siouan Indian and Choctaw Indian. Brinks is the author of seven published collections of poetry including the critically acclaimed The Caveat Onus (Black Widow Press 2009) and The Secret Brain: Selected Poems 1995 – 2012 (Black Widow Press 2012). He has been a guest on NPR radio as well as on PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Contact James Maughn @ jamaughn@cabrillo.edu for more information

A New Cadence in July: Stephen Kessler on Luis Cernuda

A NEW CADENCE POETRY SERIES PRESENTS

FORBIDDEN PLEASURES

a reading and book signing by Stephen Kessler

from his translation of the New Selected Poems of one of Spain’s greatest poets

LUIS CERNUDA

Saturday July 18, 2015, 7pm

Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street

Santa Cruz

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) is one of the leading modern poets in the Spanish language. Stephen Kessler’s earlier translation of Cernuda’s prose poems, Written in Water (City Lights Books, 2004) received the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Poetry, and his version of Cernuda’s late poems, Desolation of the Chimera (White Pine Press, 2009), received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Forbidden Pleasures (Black Widow Press, 2015), which is selected from the first twenty-five years of Cernuda’s career (1924-1949), completes the third volume of Kessler’s selected Cernuda and is the largest collection of his poetry ever to appear in English. Please join us to celebrate the publication of this important book.

For more about the translator, visit www.stephenkessler.com.

CO-SPONSORED BY POETRY SANTA CRUZ 

Sholeh Wolpé and Adela Najarro


 
Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 7:30 PM,

 Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz

Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, playwright and literary translator whose work, according to Terrain Journal, “transcends the boundaries of language, gender, ethnicity and nationality.” Born in Iran, she spent most of her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. Wolpé has authored three collections of poetry, most recently Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths. She is the editor of two anthologies, Breaking the Jaws of Silence, which gathers American voices of protest, and The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles. Her books of translations include, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad and a Persian translation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (co-translated with Mohsen Emadi), commissioned by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in celebration of Whitman’s work. Her latest book, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, will be released by W. W. Norton in 2017. Wolpé’s accolades include the 2014 Pen/Heim award, 2013 Midwest Book Award, 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize and residency awards at Hedgebrook in Whidbey Island, and Château de Lavigny in Switzerland.

Adela Najarro is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Split Geography (Mouthfeel Press) and Twice Told Over (Unsolicited Press), both published in March 2015. David A. Sullivan notes that in Split Geography “the personality that emerges from this collection is funny, poignant, irascible, and above all, in love with the promise that writing can be a spiritual exercise to remake ourselves. These are poems to live among. “About Twice Told Over, ”Juan Felipe Herrera states, “A tour de force, magnificent, lovely, sculpted, drenched with Borges, Sexton, Najarro. A radically new Latina verse.” She currently lives in Santa Cruz and teaches creative writing, literature and composition at Cabrillo College. 

Cosponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz and A New Cadence Poetry Series

A New Cadence Poetry Series

Presents

Roy Mash

and

Gerald Fleming

Reading from their works

@

The Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

May 26^th, 2015

Reception at 6:30pm

Reading begins at 7:30pm

Hosted By Robert Sward

Free

Roy Mash is a long time board member of Marin Poetry Center. He holds degrees in English, Philosophy, and Computer Science, though he currently doodles his time away staring out of café windows, dabbing up the seeds that have fallen from an everything bagel, and mentally thumbing over his poems that have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Barrow Street, Nimrod, Poetry East, and River Styx. He is the recipient of the Atlanta Review International Publication Award, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2015 Poets’ Dinner competition. His first full length book, Buyer’s Remorse (Cherry Grove Collections), debuted in 2014.

"Buyer’s Remorse is a celebration of the small, the overlooked, the underrated. Doggedly anti-lofty, reveling in the This-Worldly, the poems caper around the themes of the body, of mathematics and rationality, adolescence and middle-age, love and fear and death. The tone ranges from the irreverent to the wistful – the spritz of seltzer in the face of the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the lover standing in one sock. Drawing on sources from The Three Stooges to Archimedes, Lavoisier to Tweety Bird, Mash is a latter day Anti-Oracle, a nail in the tire of post-modernity, an incorrigible wag who’s smuggled his pea shooter into the Church of Poetry. Be ready to duck."

Gerald Fleming’s most recent books are The Choreographer, longer prose poems (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco) and Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems from Hanging Loose Press in New York. He’s written three books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). His poetry has appeared in many magazines over the decades, including New Letters, Western Humanities Review, Carolina Quarterly, New World Writing, Hanging Loose, and many others. Between 1995 and 2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, and currently edits the limited-edition vitreous magazine One (More) Glass. He taught in the San Francisco Public Schools for thirty-seven years, and lives most of the year in Northern California, part of the year in Paris.

 

Of Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing, Gary Young said:

“These dark fables, written in a language ‘born of rage,’ furiously peel back the veneer of the world we think we know. Part fairy tale, part dream, these poems explore a region where the ordinary and the fantastic overlap, where a smile can get a job, and where identities are fluid and interchangeable... Many poems are set in exotic locations—Corfu, Bali, Mexico, Ukraine—but they all merge to create a discrete, elemental landscape, a poetic geography where this remarkable collection plays out. In one poem, ‘a boy and a girl court each other by telling ghost stories.’ Gerald Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing is a collection that seduces the reader in just that way. Hold onto your socks; you’re in for a ride.” 

Co-sponsored with Poetry Santa Cruz