This is a line from the poem I wrote for the Library Anniversary in October. This photo really says it all. Posted on the Library’s Facebook page today. We are so lucky to have the great library that we do.
Poetry at San Jose’s Mayoral Inauguration
Our fearless Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, David Perez, wrote a beautiful and exciting poem for the city of San Jose. Last night he read it at the inauguration of San Jose’s new mayor, Sam Liccardo. Read it and be amazed. Read it and join in the celebration of civilization by great poets. What a tradition!
Last night I read this poem at Mayor Sam Liccardo’s Inauguration and in so doing shared the stage with Aztec dancers, Spanish guitarists, Christian ministers, Buddhist monks and wonderful host Tamara Alvarado. Thanks to Mayor Liccardo and to all who were present. Here’s the poem! And stay tuned later this month for more laureate news and upcoming events!
JANUARY AND THE RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINE
I hear shouts issued from mothers, their chords tired and tuned, bidding
daughters and sons: Stop at the crossing and wait for the light
Cutting through St. James park
the voices of women in threadbare Starter parkas
recline on liberated Safeway Market carts
Greeting me with Pall Mall smiles
their cupped hands rise as if presenting
some delicate artifact for my inspection
Where north meets south First, I hear people whisper into palm-sized boxes
of pure obsidian, and the boxes whisper back. I hear it’s the…
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Before I Die I Want To . . .
Have you ever thought of writing your New Years resolutions, wishes, dreams, plans, goals — as a poem? I’m going to try to get mine into rhyme. Wouldn’t that be fun. To live life in rhyme.
Before I die I want to sing
Before I die I want to walk
Before I die I want to blink
Before I die I want to wing
Here’s a list of New Year’s Poems from the Poetry Foundation. I snagged this photo from their site, too, (by Derek Keats).
If you click through to read Robert Haas’ “After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa” you will encounter this haiku.
New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
I think this will be my New Year’s resolution, goal. To feel about average every day. On days when I feel good, I’ll be slightly ahead, and on days when I don’t, I won’t be too disappointed. And if you’re not worried about how you’re feeling, you can enjoy the view of everything in blossom. Everything.
Happy New Year poetry people.
Poetry About Race
If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you might have seen my posts about New York Times op-ed writer, Nicholas Kristof, and his call for poems about race.
Here are two articles that he’s written in response to the 300+ poems he received. The commentary is interesting, but the poems are wonderful. Angry, beautiful, hopeful, terrifying.
- (Sunday column) When Readers Do Get It
- Winners of My Poetry Contest About Race
I don’t want to quote from the poems here, I want you to go and read them all. Then I think we should all get together and write our own. Soon.
Found Poetry. Try It and Share!
Sometimes all you need is a little kick in the pencil. This list of prompts from The Found Poetry Review is compiled from a list of phrases used by a literacy specialist at a middle school.
Here’s what I got from the exercise. I used a few of the phrases.
Many Thanks
If we were older
the first word
every morning might be
Thanks.
Thanks for another chance at day.
How many words
do you have left?
How many words do I,
how many, many, many?
Let’s start practicing
tomorrow. Or, we could
start this minute.
Thanks. Many, many, many.
Why don’t you write a poem using a prompt from this phrase list. If you do, please share.
The image for this post is from a teacher’s classroom site, where she taught found poetry. It’s amazing. I always feel so good to find others teaching poetry. Ms. Morris looks like she’s doing a bang up job.
Bay Area Generations Reading in Berkeley
Read here a post about my experiences with Bay Area Generations (poetry readings) last Monday in Berkeley.
Last Monday, at the beginning of the Christmas week, when it was almost as dark and cold and lonely as possible, I drove to Berkeley in the worst imaginable traffic to participate in a poetry reading. Of all things. My back hurt afterwards, but I’m so glad I went.The venue was the inspired, glamorous, intimate Berkeley City Club, famously designed by California architect Julia Morgan.
Bay Area Generations is “an intergenerational literary series featuring readers of different generations performing their work in tandem.” Poets submit in pairs, and accepted poems are curated into a single evening-long reading, with musical interludes, but without commentary or banter by the poets. It’s a remarkably freeing enterprise.
The whole evening was wonderful, and I hope you can take the time to listen to the entire video. But if you want to jump to the section where I was reading, paired…
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Some Poems for December
I have been feeling absent from poetry for a few weeks. It’s winter, dark, that time of year, busy, noisy, full. Today a poem came to me fully formed, literally jumping out of the bushes as I was walking to my office from the parking garage. How fortunate I am. Maybe it’s the habit of being grateful that happens over Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe it’s just time for the little voice to make itself known a little more vehemently. I’ll be listening in December and posting some poem drafts here, for you to enjoy. For me, too.
Monday December First
Walking past the hummingbird sage
after rain.
Smells like a workday.
Jennifer Swanton Brown (c) 2014
Chaos & Kindness Poetry Reading
Last night was such a great event. I was thrilled and honored to see the largest audience to date for an Unsung Holiday poetry reading. We were publicized in the De Anza college paper, so maybe that helped. Here’s a photo of the notice that my son texted me!
I’m a little cranky that I didn’t think to take any photos, but hopefully some of my friends who attended will have some photos I can share. In the meantime, the photo featured at the top of this post is of a piece of art featured at the museum right now, Thinly Veiled, by Mark Engel. It puts me in mind perfectly of chaos, and the beauty to be found there.
David Perez and Kim Johnson were fantastic and moved me and the audience with their spoken word poetry.
- Kim performed “off book” which put the rest of us to shame. But it’s also a different style of poetry — a hybrid of theater and poetry, a performance reminiscent of a one-woman play. As much as I admired what Kim did, I don’t have that voice, so will try not to be envious! Here’s a link to a performance Kim gave in 2011.
- David’s poetry is also fine and powerful. He’s a seasoned performer and I love the asides and stories about his work he shared. He read poems about his mom, which I especially enjoyed. You can find out more about David and what he’s up to, with links to his work, at his website and hear some of his performances on his YouTube channel.
If you want to hear David again soon, he’ll be reading Sunday November 16 with Erica Goss at her Poetry Kitchen at the Lost Gatos Library. Check out all his activities as Santa Clara County’s Poet Laureate here.
In addition to my featured readers, we had ten (10!) for our open mic. We put it in the middle of the show, instead of at the end where you typically hear an open mic, and I liked the arc of the reading that created. The energy was up and down and up and down again, the flow constant. Familiar faces read with us and some new folks, who I hope will come again.
The Euphrat Museum of Art is a fabulous venue, and this time the exhibit included works by De Anza and Foothill College faculty and staff. I encourage you to get over there and see the great show. I remain grateful to them for allowing us to hold our readings in such a great space.
“The De Anza and Foothill Art Faculty/Staff Show highlights the diverse yet interconnected work of art faculty and staff from De Anza College in Cupertino and Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. Painting, drawing, prints, mixed media, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and more will be on display. The fall exhibition also includes special projects with summer Artist-in-Residence Titus Kaphar and De Anza students in the Black Leadership Collective, and a Puente class Día de los Muertos installation. Sponsored by De Anza Associated Student Body, the City of Cupertino, the Friends of the Euphrat, and the Creative Arts Division.”
Chaos Never Dies on World Kindness Day
The third reading in my series on Unsung Holidays will be Thursday, November 13. Join us at the Euphrat Museum of Art, at De Anza College for two fabulous featured readers and an open mic.
Below, some information from the press release.
Featured poets for the evening are Santa Clara County Poet Laureate David Perez, and the adult winner of the 2013 Cupertino Library Foundation’s Silicon Valley Reads poetry contest, Kim Johnson.
There is no charge for this event, to be held on World Kindness Day, and celebrating Chaos, and sponsored by the City of Cupertino, the Cupertino Library Commission, the Cupertino Library Foundation and Friends of the Cupertino Library.
“The variety of events this year,” commented Swanton Brown, “has enabled me to touch the many and varied groups in Cupertino. It keeps me energized, and hopefully, encourages others to write poetry.”
Perez currently serves as the 2014-15 Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. He is a recipient of the Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship for Literary Art, a repeat guest on the NPR storytelling series “Snap Judgment,” and author of the poetry collection, “Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse” from Write Bloody Publishing. In 2012, he was voted “Best Author in the Bay” by the SF Bay Guardian. He currently lives in San Jose.
Johnson was named the 2013 Grand Prize Winner in the adult category for the Library Foundation Silicon Valley Reads poetry contest. She won $350 for her poem related to one of the featured books about technology.
The Cupertino Library operates Monday through Thursday 10AM-9PM; Friday and Saturday, 10AM-6PM; and Sunday, noon-6PM. http://www.sccl.org
The Cupertino Library Foundation is a 501(c)3 Public Benefit Corporation with the purpose to raise money to continue programs encouraging life-long learning and self-improvement through the Cupertino Library. The Foundation has the Non-Profit Seal of Approval by Guidestar demonstrating satisfaction of transparency requirements and is a member of the Google for Nonprofits program receiving tools to work efficiently. It seeks major donations from corporations and the business community and from other foundations as well as individual donations and planned gifts and bequests. For further information visit: http://www.cupertinolibraryfoundation.org.
A Very Great Poet is Gone: Galway Kinnell
A great American poet is gone. Galway Kinnell, whom I met several times, both at Poetry Center San Jose in the 1980s and at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where he was lauded as one of the founders, has died. You can read many of his poems at the Poetry Foundation site, and there are numerous videos of him reading his work, as he came to prominence in the age when people first thought to film poets.
Here is a short collection of some, I particularly love.
- From Bill Moyer’s Facebook page, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” and with commentary by Garrison Keillor here.
- “Oatmeal” from YouTube.
- Reading “The Bear” in a great black and white film from 1973.
One of my very favorite poems of his is “St. Francis and the Sow” which you can read here. Reading this poem as a young woman encouraged me, gave me a place to start. These two lines are among the reasons I teach poetry:
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness
This photo is from the SVCW’s website. That’s Bob Hass, Galway Kinnell, Brenda Hillman and Sharon Olds, probably at a benefit reading.
Cupertino Poet Laureate 