Tuesday, February 23, 2016

2/29 - Can you believe 5 Mondays in Feb? It is Maverick Night!


2/29 Maverick night Other People’s Poems (your work is blind read and we guess who wrote it) Maverick & Prompt nights the group nominates a work which then is eligible for publication in our on-line magazine at the end of the year.


Saturday, February 20, 2016

2/22 Prompt is "Full Bore"

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2/22 Prompt: Full Bore 


(prompts are thought directions and your poem does not have to include the words of the prompt – use prompts as a cliff and jump off!) Maverick & Prompt nights the group nominates a work which then is eligible for publication in our on-line magazine at the end of the year.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky features 2/8/16



2/8/16  Naomi Ruth Lowinsky hosted by Jim

 (author photo by Nora Lowinsky)
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s poetry is widely published. Her fourth full length poetry collection,The Faust Woman Poems, follows one woman’s Faustian adventures during the 1960s and ‘70s, through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her memoir, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is also the author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to find Her Female Roots. 

Lowinsky is a Jungian Analyst, a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute where she has taught a poetry workshop, Deep River, for many years. She is co-editor, with Patricia Damery of the essay collection Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way as well as Poetry Editor of Psychological Perspectives, a publication of the Los Angeles Jung Institute

She lectures and gives writing workshops in many settings and blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com.

Where Coyote Brush Roams

Well they’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.
                                                                                          W.S. Merwin

We were high on the sky when we lived on that ridge     high
on the red tailed hawk     high
on the long green rumps of the hills going yellow
while the sun did its dance from winter to summer and back     high
on our ridge after work while the fog flowed over
darkening hills     We poured red wine on the earth     high
on escape from the city’s exhaust     high
on the song of the frogs in the pond
some man had made         
Never mind

that the pines and the cottonwood trees
knew they didn’t belong up there     Never mind
that electrical towers asserted their rights    
that coyote brush said the land was its own  
that the ridge wanted fire and we did not
We weed whacked     cleared     cut down those pines     Never mind
that we heard their cries in the night
though they never belonged up there     Never mind
that the frogs went away one day and so did we

The ancient ones who walked these lands
who made their arrows from coyote brush    
knew not to make one’s home on a ridge 
for a ridge will insist on fire
  
Home is in a valley
by a river among cottonwoods    
where once there was a river
                                            where frogs once sang in spring                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                        Never mind