Ralph Dranow Features Feb. 5th

02/05/2018 Ralph Dranow hosted by Jan

Ralph Dranow's widely published poems focus on exploring our common humanity and the poetry and beauty of everyday life. His most recent books are A New Life and Love in Unexpected Places, a limited edition letterpress book. He works as a freelance editor and ghostwriter.

Trees

They never market themselves,

Post of Facebook

Or tweet on Twitter.

Yet day after day,

Like alchemists,

These majestic beings

Take in carbon dioxide

And breathe out oxygen.

Their sturdy trunks, strong roots

Are barriers to soil erosion, floods.

Leaves provide shade,

Bark valuable medicines,

Branches sweet fruits.

Communal creatures,

Inspiring role models,

Trees share water and nutrients with each other.

And like Jesus,

They die for our sins,

Not only for houses, furniture, paper

But the insatiable, fanged maw

Of profit.

I nominate trees for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Ralph Dranow 

Editing, Ghostwriting, & Writing-Coaching Services

www.ralphdranow.net

Author ~

A NEW LIFE: POEMS, by Ralph Dranow

$14.95 / print edition

The 76 vivid poems in this book offer a unique and compassionate view of what it is to be human. "Ralph's poetry is tender and honest and bittersweet, like sweet-sour candy melting on the tongue. His poems nestle into the heart in a genuinely comforting way." ~ Shonen Bressler " 

Available from Rose Press

1/29/18 Make Us Laugh -- evening for your funny work.

01/29/2018 HA HA night--bring your humorous work hosted by Gary

Please also see Our new Daily Prompts: Prompt A Day

Mare’ Simonet features January 22

Mare’ Simonet is a poet and multi-media artist, living in Berkeley, CA. Her series of essays, Confessions of a Dopamine Addict,  as well as her first poetry book, The Poet Next Door, are due to be released in early 2018.  Both works include many humorous references that reveal aspects of life with Parkinson’ s Disease.

While Ms. Simonet has said she dislikes being labeled as a disabled artist, living with Parkinson’s Disease has influenced her choices of

subject matter and the desire to create a mythology with a  message .

Mare’ has said that poetry is  “ without linear parameters .. One can disregard, recreate, bend, flex, or falsify time in a poem.”

After she presented a poem written two days after her husband passed away, a recent reviewer had this to say :

… I heard the writings of a friend (of his) who had lost a loved one recently, and her words, like a gale, swept powerfully through the room but exited gently and with such raw elegance that it left me wishing I knew how to write.

During the program, Mare’ will read excerpts from her essays and book, as well as new works dedicated to her late husband .

Untitled

my mind is inoperably bound to memory 

I try to hold on when the ascent is threatened

try to stay calm, find a portable bridge

to negotiate that rotten crevasse

filled with the carcasses of lost phrases,

today's to-do list, yesterday's memos

sometimes the tightly wrapped package

becomes unbound

the flow of remembered occurrences 

stretched out in one long straight line

coyly teasing the telomeres, trying to outrace them

Fred Dodsworth features January 15th.

01/15/18 Fred Dodsworth hosted by Bruce 
(Need a prompt? "The name I don't call myself" -- as in any use or thought of it -- you don't have to use those words.)

Fred Dodsworth As a 30 year publishing professional Fred Dodsworth has launched and or edited or published more than a dozen magazines and newspapers and three books on California Indians. Six years ago he decided to go to college, graduating magna cum laude from SFSU in 2013 with a bachelors in Creative Writing (concentration in Gender Studies). He earned his Masters in Poetry from SFSU in 2017 and is now pursuing an MFA in Fiction.

Formerly a high-school drop out, front-page daily columnist (SF Examiner), award winning art director, sandal maker, and truck driver (not in that order), in his professional career Fred was fortunate enough to work with renown designer Roger Black and to publish work by Alan Ginsberg, June Jordon, Kim Addonizio, Amy Wallace, Garrison Keillor, Corby Kummer, Ginu Kamani and many other accomplished and beginning writers.

Co-host of the 8th 9th & 10th Annual SF Beat Poetry Festival, board member of the 20th Annual Watershed Ecological Poetry Festival, co-organizer of the Northern California Book Awards, collective member of the Beast Crawl Collective for 5 years (now retired), founding board member of Bay Area Generations—A Reading Series For The Ages (now retired), for the last six years Fred Dodsworth has worked with Sharon Coleman producing Milvia Street, the venerable Peralta Colleges literary magazine. He is also publications advisor to Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash.

Fred has been a featured reader at the 2014 Annual Berkeley Poetry Festival, East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest, Art of the Muse, Broken Concrete, Literary Speakeasy, Red Light at the Battery, Pandemonium Press at the Spice Monkey, Moe’s Books, Writing Without Walls, the MFA Reading Series, Velvet Revolution, Rolling Writers, Nomadic Press, riverbabble, Red Light Lit, the Aesthetic Union, The Battery, XYZ at the Stork, the SF Beat Poetry Festival, Rolling Writers, Heart of the Muse, Black Health Matters, Naked Bulb, and many other reading series events. 


His stories and poems have been published in Red Light Lit, Rag Mag, Troop, Oakland Review #3, riverbabble, Transfer, Milvia Street, Bay Area Generations, Writing Without Walls, Saturday Night Special, Something Worth Revising, US Represented, 11-9 the Fall of Democracy, RISE!, and others. He’s currently finishing a book of poems, a book of short stories, and his first novel.

Julia Vinograd Features 01/18/2018

01/8/18 Julia Vinograd hosted by Jim

Julia Vinograd is a Berkeley street poet.  She has published over 59 books of poetry and won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. She has a B.A. from UC Berkeley and a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.  A Pushcart Prize winner for "The Young Men Who Died of AIDS," she has a Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Berkeley and is one of the editors of the anthology New American Poetry Vol. I: The Babarians of San Francisco -- Poets from Hell. Her latest chapbook "Look Out"has just been published in October, 2016