Poetry Lunch
Informal poetry reading series with Myrna Keliher, live on Instagram @expeditionpress and archived here. Also! Here's a booklist on bookshop.org, so you can buy them and read them!
Reading “For the Young Vine Maples” by David Wagoner
Wanted, unwanted, bent or straight, looking for light always and “alive where they are.” Something about that line I find very soothing, it reminds me to be alive where I am, less concerned with where I should be.
Listening to “Maunakea” by No‘u Revilla
This poem makes me miss my grandma, and worry and wonder after the seeds inside me and out, and remember the regenerative qualities of water.
Reading “Heart Butte, Montana” by M. L. Smoker
I feel like I’m always hovering there in the almost, between ways. The less I think about it the more I’m in it and the more I think the farther I get from the path I was feeling out.
Reading “Warning” by Jenny Joseph
A poem about cutting loose and letting go, about not caring what others think, about living with abandon and questioning when that’s possible.
Reading three poems from The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang
Each poem almost feels like a stone itself, polished smooth and hard and weighing heavy for its size. There’s a deep paring down I feel in the language and a lot of finality, too.
Reading “What You Are Doing Is Living” by M. Soledad Caballero
This poem weaves the natural world into the unnatural world of medical exams, diagnoses, treatment. Mush of dead crabs on the beach, wrong cells replicating.
Reading “Fetishes of the Floating World” by Don Domanski
I love how these words float while the lines ground them, and their strong movement forward while fighting to be present.
Reading “Lullaby” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
I love the honesty of this poem. It makes our failure plain, in a simple excruciating way, and I find that helpful.
Reading “Our sermon today concerns the dialectic” by Terrance Hayes
I love how tight and smooth and strong these sonnets are, while managing to be so grounded, and reach wildly high, and break off lines in masterful opening-up inviting-in kinds of ways.
Reading “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
So many poems deal with loss, I think in large part because it’s a topic that’s hard to assign words to. This take makes light of an awful heavy that hits you full square at the end.
Reading “What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” by Brad Aaron Modlin
... made me feel all the things I’ve been trying to learn that I always think I should already know. Isn’t obvious to know how to feel at home, for instance?
Reading “Untitled poem about sensitization” & “The things the dead have touched” by Erin Noteboom
If you’ve had someone impossibly close die impossibly (and isn’t death always impossible to us living?) then you know those terrible awkward decisions that have to happen about socks.
Reciting “Throwing Away the Mail” by Wendell Berry
What have you tried to simplify lately that wasn’t simple?
Reading “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” by Jane Wong
There are so many issues in our world rooted in wanting more. This poem gives us more and then some...
Reading “There, There, Grieving” by Zeina Hashem Beck
We go from deep dear familiarity to blown wide open nothing/everything in a line and a half.
Reading “Leaving” by Li-Young Lee
I love the idea of less nearness making way for more farness, for things far to get to come into view.
Reading three poems by Mosab Abu Toha
Imagine waking to the ground shaking, looking out your window, and seeing your neighbor’s house gone.
Reading “In all of my dreams, the words I love you” by Hanif Abdurraqib
I like the forgetting and remembering that keeps happening throughout the poem and how it becomes an act of drowning itself; I certainly feel washed up and shook up and glad to be alive here at the shore of just having read it.
Reading “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s idea of stretching strengths between opposites, maybe even finding strength there — it unsettled me and I think it provided a key to find my way out of forced dualities. Or at least allowed for a door.
Reading “kara sevde” by Amber Flame
“dear reader, this is a spell for you. if you’ve been lonely, or broken. if you’ve longed for love that did not make you afraid to be whole. if you’ve longed to be free and longed to be home…”
Reading “Loveable” by Raymond Antrobus
Have you ever not said “I love you too” when someone said “I love you”? Have you been on the other end, received that silence?
Reading “Woman with Amputated Breast at her Mother-in-Law's Grave” by Katie Farris
I feel the poem pushing at that door to the grave as it moves from line to line, wondering wide and coming back in tight to the details of daily life.
Reading “The River of Bees” by W.S. Merwin
This poem has me mulling on living vs surviving, vs thriving — I tend to be one for extremes so the idea of a middle ground being the point, or the place is foreign.
Reading “A Thousand Twangling Instruments” by T. Liem
For me this poem holds a lot of both/and: acceptance and standing up; quiet and strength; being and not; continuing and returning. It refuses one way in all the ways I can read it.
Reading “Eb” with Niels Goovaerts
This idea of ebbing — coming and going, beginning and ending, always repeating, ending yet repeating — it feels difficult to speak to in English for me as well. But I know the feeling of standing at the shore’s edge & how a tide moves...
Reading “Landing” by Linda Hogan
A poem for you about landing as I take off again! With gratitude for all the grounding poetry gives and sweet whisking away by one’s friends.
Reading “We Love What We Have” by Mosab Abu Toha
A breath, a full and plenty-ness dropped in the midst of much death. Ongoing.
Reading “Sunflower Sonnet Number Two” by June Jordan
I don’t remember when I first read this poem but it was in a different book and a different time. I do remember how I felt when I read it, longing for long term love and recognizing the perfect contradictions and depth of it this poem names so well.
Reading “In a Time of Peace” by Ilya Kaminsky
The war. All the wars. Still we are living. I think Ilya’s work asks us how, how are we living? And can we do better?
Reading “November 19, 2016” by Cedar Sigo
This poem has my mind branching and stretching in many directions, I love the simplicity and open feeling I get alongside very concrete imagery. Maybe because of the imagery?
Reading “Middle of the Way” by Galway Kinnell
When I read the line “Concocted a little fire in the darkness.” I immediately thought of poetry being the fire, and writing it being the act of concocting.
Reading “Saturn’s Rings” by Ellen Bass
I feel quite calm every time I get to the end of this poem. While it draws up many sadnesses and curious connections, it lets them go as it moves through memory and acknowledgment back to being.
Reading “Thank you” by Ross Gay
Wishing you so many thanks, both given and received, and much time outside. Remember when you’re at a loss, and have nothing to say, “thank you” is always a good bet.
Reading “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich
I love “worn by salt and sway” and the fact that the haunters are tentative. That the wreck is terrible yes and hard to see, takes time to get to, but once you’re there it’s quiet and oh so beautiful and you get to be your many selves without any which one competing. Everyone’s allowed.
Reading “The Creation Story” by Joy Harjo
I can’t remember when I first read this poem but my strong association with the book is slipping it into a tote bag on the way to the ER. Even in emergencies—actually, especially then—I bring poetry.
Reading “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
When I am overcome with grief, even in the seizing, halting, gasping, blustery nose-blowing throes of it, there’s always a small hard seed of gratitude for the feeling I am feeling.