Tag: Wine+Words

  • Poetry of Brigit Treux, Thursday night

    Poetry of Brigit Treux, Thursday night

    This Thursday’s Poetry night features Brigit Treux.  The evening starts earlier this time, 7:30PM for the open mic, at Mari’s Wine Bar, 8222 Firestone Blvd., Downey, across from Porto’s.

    Brigit Truex has lived in the Sierra foothills of northern California for a dozen years, and her newest book, Strong as Silk: The Gold Hill Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Company, Prose and Poems, has just been published by Lummox Press. Through letters, journal entries and poems, Truex weaves the true story of the rise and fall of a Japanese colony in Gold Hill in the 1860’s, a group of samurai-class men and women who fled Japan after a civil war hoping to grow silk and tea in California. Strangers in a strange land.

    At dawn’s edge, heron
    steps into pond of black silk.
    Water heals itself.
    ~*~
    Line by line, wild geese
    inscribe farewell notes on sky.
    Wind fingers their nests.
    ~*~
    Brigit is part Abenak-Cree and part Irish. Her Native American name is Cedarwoman. When not writing poetry, she can be found at pow-wows, performing dances. She has founded workshops in Massachusetts and California. Her newest group is Red Fox Underground.

     

  • Wine+Words features Laurie Soriano April 19th

    Wine+Words features Laurie Soriano April 19th

    On the third Thursday of the month, Wine+Words monthly poetry night brings the spoken word to Mari’s Wine Bar.  Beginning with an open mic at 8PM, each month features a reading from a prominent Southern California poet at 8:30PM.  Lorine Parks curates the evening.

    This month, Thursday April 19th features Laurie Soriano, winner of the Best Poetry Book of 2011 by the Indie Lit Awards.

    A sensualist of the tongue, Soriano crafts poems that see the world with absolute clarity and then selects the details that will make it come alive for us.  What she chooses to see most are people and animals. Soriano often uses animal imagery when talking of herself or other persons.  Take the animal portrait of an aged couple in “Early Birds:”

    They are hollow-boned, take their clawed hands

    And guide them gently to the car . .

    Her hair is a puff of white, his a scattering of dry grass

    They bicker still, chirp/cheep in harmony . .

    Tired from the flight, they totter off to bed.

    Soriano write of the intimate music of relationship, desire and frailty.  “Her poems tread quietly and cut deeply.  They are relaxed yet sinewy.  They are carefully measured and yet suddenly disarming.” –Billy Steinberg, songwriter.   Soriano lives in Palos Verdes and in her day job in Century City she is a music attorney, representing recording artists and others in the music industry.  She has a husband, three children and many pets.  Her semi-autobiographical Catalina, (Lummox Press), ranges from “Coast” to “To Coast” to “Being Here” to “Looking Out.” 

  • Wine+Words presents the Poetry of Raindog, March 15

    Wine+Words presents the Poetry of Raindog, March 15

    Our next poetry reading is Thursday March 15, at Mari’s Wine Bar.

    Raindog has spent the last twenty-five years pouring all his resources into poetry in the greater Long beach area, not only writing it but publishing, editing and promoting poets. His latest book is about some hospital experiences: ER/OR Living Among the Mangled.

    He had to sell his Bukowski book collection to keep going, and does handyman jobs for a living. He drives across the western states giving readings and selling books from his Lummox Press, and the Little Red Book series.

    By the way, if any one wants to donate an old car and get a deduction, he needs one.

    He’s going to talk a little about Bukowski, and it should be a night to remember.  Open mic sign-ups begin at 7:30PM, then begins at 8PM.  Raindog will read at 8:30.

  • Wine+Words Poetry with Bruce Williams Feb 17

    Wine+Words Poetry with Bruce Williams Feb 17

    Our third-Thursdays poetry series continues at Mari’s Wine Bar with Bruce Williams as the featured poet.  The open mic sign-ups begin at 7:30 PM for the first 10 poets, which begins at 8PM.  Mr. Williams will read at 8:30PM.  Mari’s is at 8222 Firestone Blvd, Downey, CA across from Porto’s.  Wheelchair accessible, but 21 and over only.  The Downey Arts Coalition sponsors these events, which are curated by Lorine Parks.

    Bruce Williams grew up in Denver and received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University. For years he taught writing at Mount San Antonio College. He has two grown children, Drew, also a poet, and Casey Lynnette, a lawyer, like her mother, William’s late wife, Ellen. The poet still lives on a hill high above San Dimas, California with memories, a mountain-climbing roomer and two Jeeps. But he is spending much of his retirement in a cabin in Yucca Valley, near Joshua Tree Bruce has published several chapbooks: Clothes Poems (Pudding House), Stratification (Inevitable Press) and Everyone In My Support Group Feels Grateful After I Share. His first book length work, The Mohave Road and Other Journeys, has been published by Tebot Bach.

    Bruce Williams’ “The Mojave Road and Other Journeys” is simply one of the most breathtaking and heartbreaking collections of poetry I’ve read in many years. These poems constitute a sequence of elegies and a folio of meditations upon illness, death and transcendence, and also upon the nature of late, redeeming love—David St. John

    VARIATIONS

    June 30

    1
    Dawn heats the sky,
    bird song, dog barks a warning.
    The hive in the wash
    starts its buzz.

    2
    Her face
    wrinkles into summer.
    Her sex and eyes
    stay young.

    3
    She asks,
    “Who is this poem about?”
    He looks at her
    and lies

     

  • Poetry Night, Wine+Words with Judith Pacht, January 19th

    Poetry Night, Wine+Words with Judith Pacht, January 19th

    The Downey Arts Coalitions “Wine+Words” poetry series moves to Third-Thursdays in January.

    A good group made it out to hear Rick Smith in November.  The featured poet this month will be Judith Pacht, reading on Thursday January 19.  DAC member Lorine Parks curates the evening.

    Pacht is a seasoned poet and teaches poetry workshops on subjects such as “Warping Time in Poetry.” Her newest book, Summer Hunger (Tebot Bach), has won PEN’s 2011 Southwest Book Award for Poetry.

    While Pacht likes to play with words and sounds, her poems always reach for a larger conclusion. In “Surfaces,” she speaks of “the business traveler who clinches a merger, the hungry lovers who clinch and merge.” And in “Small Things” her rhythms takes the reader beyond a shared delight in the minutia of daily life and even the subtle interplay of Dodger baseball, to a further understanding:

    Praise the sticky pollen on the bee’s
    hind legs, the blossom’s private parts, the fruit.
    Praise all vowels: masa and metate,
    smooth and avocado, quesadilla.
    Praise Nomo backing first base on Beltre’s throw,
    Cohen reaching Ahmed, Ahmed reaching
    words both used to know, speaking, speaking.

    The poetry event will begin at 7:30 pm in Mari’s Wine Bar, at 8222Firestone, across from Porto’s, with sign–ups for open mike readings by volunteer local poets. Open mike reading will begin at 8 pm and Pacht will read at 8:30. The audience is invited to stay afterward for informal discussion with Pacht and other poets. Admission is free and there is handicap access and easy parking in the rear.

    MARI’S WINE BAR

    8222 Firestone Blvd, Downey 90241, between Downey and LaReina

    across from Porto’s free parking in back handicap access

    For more about Judith, and a complete bio, visit her website at judithpacht.com 

  • Rick Smith featured poet at Wine+Words

    Friday night at 9PM is Poetry at Mari’s Wine Bar, this month featuring poet Rick Smith, who long worked in Downey at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital.

    20111117-165133.jpg

    The first kiss,

    two wrens on fire,

    blind with smoke and heat

    storming out of the underbrush

    of self-restraint

    into a trembling

    orgasmic future

    well above the starving dogs

    fast food chains,

    the quick fixes below.

    This flame will lick the wound

    This flame will light up like this.

    This flame will consume. from Hard Landings

    Lorine Parks is curating the evening, which will begin with an open mic for the first 10 sign-ups. She describes how she came to know Rick.

    “I first met Rick Smith thirty years ago when he was playing harmonica and piano in a band and composing such songs as “If it wasn’t for low class, we wouldn’t have no class at all.” Paris and Pennsylvania bred, he told me my Stonewood Travel business’s Music in Hold was crummy music, and proceeded to record a new tape for me. We have been friends and exchanging poems and critiques ever since.

    “Smith’s first chapbook was The Wren Notebook, one of Raindog’s Little Red Book Series. In it, his protagonist Wren decides to win the title of Highest Flying Bird by hitching a ride tucked under Eagle. When Wren pops up, at twelve thousand feet and then flies a few feet higher, he almost freezes to death on re-entry. Further, Eagle and the rest of the birds chase him to have their revenge.. . “I held the note/long and rich as I could./ So what if it’s the only note I know?/ It’s my note.”

    “All of Smith’s poems have a wry humor but they also have an intensely personal voice. He has an intimate quality to his work and a dead-flat realistic approach to what’s happening. Murder and revenge and a Buick LeSabre from Phoenix have equal place with delicate birds nesting in ruined upholstery in an abandoned mansion on an estate near Philadelphia.”

    Smith has a PhD in psychology and worked in Downey at Rancho Los Amigo as a psychologist therapist for head-injured patients. He later established a rehab center in Apple Valley called Back in the Saddle for brain injuries. Read him at your peril. An old wren with one good eye, six feet four inches tall, “measuring out time by that splendid chaos, commotion.”

    Live music by members of Downey’s folk band Willow Bend will perform at 8pm.  Learn more about their unique brand of music at http://www.willowbendmusic.com