NO PE ON 7/4

6/27/16 Prompt: books when 6

6/27 Prompt: Books When Six (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 hosted by Liz

Stan Morner featured 6/20/16

6/20  Stan Morner  hosted by Jan

After three years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, Stan Morner spent
a career as a high school English teacher, most of it in the Mt. Diablo
Unified School District. Mr. Morner is a vice president in The Ina
Coolbrith Circle, a literary organization founded by California’s
first Poet Laureate, Ina Coolbrith. He has been a swimmer with the
Walnut Creek Masters Swim Team for nearly 30 years and is a member of
the Lafayette Orinda Presbyterian Church. Stan Morner was born in 1934
in Wisconsin and came to California when he was nine months old because
his father had been given a contract as an actor/singer with MGM. His
father, AKA Dennis Morgan, made 52 films in Hollywood as a leading man.
Stan Morner has published poetry, fiction, and essays in a number of
periodicals, including _California English, Kansas Magazine, Anais, an
Iyternational Journal, Collages and Bricolages, and The San Jose Mercury
News, Bulletin of the California State Library Foundation. _Mr. Morner
is currently working on a book concerning his family’s experiences inHollywood.

Harold Dull featured 6/13

6/13 Harold Dull  hosted by Jim

in 1957 Harold joined the poets meeting regularly with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan 
in the  San Francisco Renaissance. Many books and readings later, 
Harold found himself in another scene, the warm pool at Harbin Hot Springs 
where he created the world’s first aquatic bodywork, Watsu, 
which he has taught in thirty countries. Harold, 
who has been dry-docked in Berkeley since the fire took out Harbin,  
will read poems from both of those lives.
Find Watsu at watsu.com and Harold at watsu.com/harold

Poem for Calias

Your friends may think it odd
that a father and daughter's ages are so far apart
but your 17 is a perfect mirror to my 71.
Though next year
yours is just one quarter of mine.
Relationships change.
But from the moment before you were born
when you whispered the name Calias in my ear
ours has been constant
as constant as the flow I see in your dance
and feel in your Watsu
and hear your bow draw out of your cello's strings.
The same flow flies on the wings and fins
of the fairies and mermaids you paint for me.
The more the earth changes under our feet
the closer we are.
But the farther apart we are in age
the more of the changes to come you may have to face alone.
There is not much I can do about that.
Now is just this moment
sitting on the couch together tonight
the brighter and blacker the fire and smoke
in Herzog's Doomsday
the closer we draw together
no matter how far apart we come from
nor how far apart we will be going away from.

Jeramy DeCristo featured 6/6/16

6/6 Jeramy DeCristo hosted by Bruce

 Jeramy DeCristo is a black Bay Area-based artist and writer working in sound, text, image, structure and movement. The conceptual dimensions of his work, whether art installation or poetry, emerge largely from thinking and rethinking blackness as a profoundly radical aesthetic form and material; specifically he thinks through the formal, material and epistemological worlds made possible in and through black music. He also makes music under his own name and the pseudonym OKeh. DeCristo is currently a University of California President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Literature Department at UC San Diego where he is working on a book about black experimental music, entitled Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity. He obtained his PhD from the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz in 2015.