Monday, January 27, 2020

2/3/2020 Dee Allen & Heather Scott

2/3/2020 Dee Allen & Heather Scott hosted by Elaine.

Session will start PROMPTLY AT 7PM to allow time for both features.




Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on the creative writing & Spoken Word tips since the early1990s. Author of 4 books [ Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater and Skeletal Black, all from POOR Press ] and 24 anthology appearances [ including Poets 11: 2014, Feather Floating On The Water, Rise, Your Golden Sun Still Shines, What Is Love, The City Is Already Speaking, The Land Lives Forever, Extreme and Civil
Liberties United, edited by ShizuĂ© Seigel ] under his figurative belt so far. Allen’s fifth book, Elohi Unitsi, will be released Earth Day 2020
from Conviction 2 Change Publishing.



Heather Scott is a teacher in Oakland and sometimes writer. She writes about love and relationships. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire. 













Monday, January 20, 2020

Dan Lineham Features 1/27/2020

1/27/2020 Dan Linehan hosted by Gary




A longtime professional writer, author, and award-winning poet, Dan Linehan often interweaves nature, current events, and far-flung lands. His poetry has been published widely in books, newspapers, and literary journals, including in The Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets. He is passionate about helping to solve environmental crises through creativity. Dan’s new multimedia serial novel The Princess of the Bottom of the World includes poetry inspired by his travels to Antarctica and Argentina. For more, visit: www.dslinehan.com


THE BEAGLE CHANNEL
by Dan Linehan

Sandra told me about her silver ring.
Her mother had said
            silver has healing powers.
I showed her my silver earring.
I feel like a pirate now.
She has a telescope back in Chile.
This is her last cruise.
She knows magic tricks.
We watched the comet,

            sharing a pair of binoculars.


* Check out links for The Princess of the Bottom of the World:
       Get the Series
       Events
* Participant Media films a short profile of me and my work
* My work in Argentina: writing, teaching, film, and a deadly storm...
* Climate change interviews with Sylvia Earle, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Charles Ferguson
* For these and more, visit my website at www.dslinehan.com

Thursday, January 16, 2020

1/20/2020 Caroline Goodwin features



1/20/2020 Caroline Goodwin host Bruce



Caroline Goodwin's books are Trapline (2013), Peregrine (2015), The Paper Tree (2017) and Custody of the Eyes (2019). Her recent poem, "Snaketime III", was runner-up in The Sewanee Review 2019 poetry contest, judged by Carl Phillips. She teaches at CCA, Stanford Continuing Studies and UC Berkeley Extension (in the summer). In 1999 she moved from Sitka, Alaska to California to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow; from 2014-16 she served as San Mateo County's first Poet Laureate.


SNAKETIME III

If you show up
today I will open
the door, put on
the kettle. Familiar

as the net-vein willow,
catkin fur
we use for
wicks. At night

I can hear
the roots
beneath the floor. Girl
who sits humming
on the back porch,

tapping her hands
into fins.
If under
the lichens the weevils
are moving,
if under my
palms the water

spreads.

A faraway flapping.
A trap door,
wind. The ways
in which the river
speaks. Open it up,

you’ll see. You’ll let it in.

Monday, January 6, 2020

Paul Jolly features 1/13/20

1/13/2020Paul Jolly hosted by Jim

Paul Jolly was raised in Oakland, and, after a thirty year detour on the East Coast, returned to Berkeley in the summer of 2019.  His poems have appeared in Permafrost, the Columbia Review, and Straylight.  His first book, Why Ice Cream Trucks Play Christmas Songs, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2018. 


Miracle drugs

Sunlight through clouds, taa-daa!  Trumpet
fanfares in the lab window, refracts
on beakers and test tubes.  Lab
drudges halt their rote to compare

charts with angels.  The apothecary
cleric’s shelf recently held a smatter
of cures: saints’ relics, holy
water, tinctures, unguent.  Now

many shelves hold baskets and baskets,
loaf baskets, fish baskets. 
High church muckety mucks
(mucks at least) preside at drug

trials.  The mucks want crutches
heaved by healed cripples, billion
dollar profits, Nobel prize, handicapped
stickers discarded from cars.  Proof

requires reams of forms.  Check
miracle type: blindness cure,
hemorrhage plug, cripples walk,
or the Lalapalooza: Lazarus alive

post-flatline.  And randomized
samples!  No chocolate sampler
was ever so random.  Did placebo
-takers get prayed at same as druggies? 

Did all the docs carry the same tracts
in their grand round lab coat
pockets?  Did prayer warriors spout
glossolalia in the same dead language?

Was there a between-shifts non sectual
moment of silence at the nurses station
in each clinic?  Identical hymns, time
-release capsules, scriptures, syringes,

Hallmark prayer cards, patches, inhalers,
beads, inhibitors, enzymes, chants,
implants?  Double-blinders want to know:
Was the philanthropist who endowed each hospital

faithish?  Does a buried urn in the arid
land of Genesis hold test results that went
wrong for pharma, papyrus
that proves placebo as helpful as drug? 

2020 Starts with a Roar: Kelliane Parker Features

1/6/2020 Kelliane Parker hosted by Elaine Brown



Kelliane Parker is a Bay Area poet and co host of My Word Open Mic. Her work has been featured  in local anthologies and she has performed around the Bay Area and. Her work gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and other violent trauma to heal and break the cycle.


While the world sleeps
By Kelliane Parker
While the world sleeps, I negotiate and wrestle
I let go and become. The night person, sleepless.
Untamed and improper, irreverent and unmanageable,
Unpredictable and uncooperative. I unearth secrets
And deconstruct stories, stories carefully crafted and rehearsed
By the entire cast in the role of a lifetime
For a lifetime…a life sentence, really.
And I nurture and embrace The Survivor
The one who faced down monsters from untold fairy tales
Where the outside world finds most of us unworthy
Of be saved or believed. So again we save ourselves,
Unless we don’t. And then the body count is uncounted,
By the unspeakable cancer called shame.
And another is lost
And, another…is… lost
So, tell me your secrets, the ones you don’t even tell yourself
What could you lose to tell another unworthy, the familiar tale.
Only the cast member names are different, but the story is the same
So we share the secret handshake, to acknowledge our membership
Only this time, it is different, we are the majority
And the light no longer stings our eyes, or maybe it just makes us feel alive
To feel something, anything even pain is beautifully real
You, my sisters, count
I see you, I hear you
I will remember your name
And I, I believe you