For Immediate Release
Contact: Paul E. Nelson
Global Voices Radio/SPLAB!
Ilalqo, WA98002
http://splabman.blogspot.com/

Global Voices Radio / SPLAB! E-Fishwrapper

In this E-Fishwrapper, George Bowering and Marion Kines at Subtext.

I don’t know if I can stress how important these two poets are, for much different reasons in one sense, and because they are heart-attack serious about poetry. (I guess at their age, maybe that’s not a good metaphor.)

George Bowering is much more than the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada. He’s perhaps the most prolific writer I’ve ever known, a pure poet (to use Michael McClure’s phrase) and a generous teacher.

Part of the legendary TISH group of early 60’s Vancouver, which created an original Canadian poetry, influenced by some of the best of the postmodern poets who began to visit them in 1963 just before and after the seminal Vancouver Poetry Conference, including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and others.

For more, look at Rob McLennan’s excellent essay on Jacket Magazine:

Throughout the 1960s onward, whatever the avant was at the time, somehow Bowering was almost always at the front of it, whether leading it through his poetry, fiction, critical work, editing or publishing, all the while still working on his sports writing, that he had started as a high school columnist for the local paper.

And to realize that THIS is his first reading in Seattle shows that we need to pay more attention to the space just beyond our collective nose.

Marion Kimes has been in Seattle for a couple of decades. She has quietly become, in my view, the Matriarch of Seattle poetry. This is not only because of her remarkable poems, but also because of her commitment to the community. She almost single-handedly kept Red Sky Theater humming for many of its final ten years at the Globe Café. She mentored young poets with simple lines, such as the one to a beginner poet who had mostly angry poems when she said: Can I ask you a question? What is your commitment to beauty?

Her own beauty is revealed over & over sometimes in simple poems, like the one that chronicles the luminous details about making ends meet:

ON FISTFULLS OF NOT-MUCH-IN-THE-END

Medicare’s A B C & D dwarf my pile of pills,
the bills. reading to page 109 (choices, lists
& co-pays, limits & penalties, forms & deadlines)
rouses my fury. challenged and chastened,
I whisper new vows (open and amendable):
walk upright. eat organic. take naps.
season with wine & laughter.



WHAT: SUBTEXT READING - George Bowering (Vancouver) & Marion Kimes
WHERE: CHAPEL PERFORMANCE SPACE - 4th Floor of GOOD SHEPHERD CENTER
located at 4649 Sunnyside N, just south of 50th St in Wallingford
WHEN: 7:30 PM, WEDNESDAY AUGUST 6, 2008
TICKETS: Donations accepted at the door.

Subtext continues its monthly reading series with readings by George Bowering & Marion Kimes at our new home at the Chapel Performance Space on the 6th of August 2008. Donations for admission will be taken at the door on the evening of the performance. The reading starts at 7:30pm.

George Bowering is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was born in Penticton, British Columbia, and raised in the nearby town of Oliver, where his father was a high-school chemistry teacher. His most recent books include Baseball Love (Talonbooks, 2006), and Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006.

Bowering is the best-known of a group of young poets including Frank Davey, Fred Wah, Jamie Reid, and David Dawson who were together at the UBC in the 1950s. There they founded the journal Tish. Bowering lives in Vancouver, BC and is Emeritus at Simon Fraser, where he has worked for more than 25 years. He describes himself as a Protestant agnostic. In 2002, Bowering was appointed the first ever Canadian Poet Laureate.

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/bowering/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bowering

Marion Kimes brought her love of the live reading here in 1981. Over the years a fine pile of small-press books & broadsides has accumulated beside a long list of readings, fests & projects. Her books include CROW'S EYES, of multiplication & light (Nine Muses), Whirled, and NAMORATUNG'A (Woodworks). She has been a driving force in Red Sky Theatre for many years.

http://www.ravenchronicles.org/nwwriter/index/kimes/kimes.htm

Happy Postcarding & Happy August.

Paolo

Paul E. Nelson
Global Voices Radio
SPLAB!
American Sentences
Organic Poetry
Poetry Postcard Blog
Ilalqo, WA 253.735.6328 or 888.735.6328