We at poetrynight are pleased to announce the establishment of the Ken Warfel Fellowship in honor of Ken Warfel. Ken was a poet of great merit, a teacher, mentor and friend. Ken leaves a lasting legacy across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

The Fellowship will distinguish and reward poets who, like Ken, have made substantial and continuing contributions to their poetry communities. The Fellowships are intended to support Fellows’ efforts into the future.

The selection criteria for entrants will be rigorous and merit-based. Briefly, selected fellows will be residents of the greater Pacific Northwest (Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Montana.) Entrants must be poets of merit, and must be making important contributions to their communities in the areas of performance, education, and mentoring.

Members of the poetrynight Board continue working on selection criteria and are contacting members of the poetry community to serve on the selection committee. We have identified a judge of the competition, and hope to announce this person’s acceptance early this year.

Poetrynight will award one or more Ken Warfel Fellowships annually, beginning in April 2012. Based on funding obtained, the initial award will be $1000 to each Fellow. Funds in excess fellowships awarded will be rolled over for the following year’s Ken Warfel Fellowship Award.

Additionally, we are seeking permanent endowment of the Fellowship.

Please support the Ken Warfel Fellowship financially. Poetrynight is a vital part of the Whatcom Poetry Series, a 501(c)(3) organization. Your donations will be tax-deductible. We request contributions by March 31, 2012.

Please contact poetrynight with any questions to fellowship@poetrynight.org.

We appreciate your support. Thank you!

We are The Photo Booth and we’re taking the nation this winter in a light blue Toyota Camry named Skeeter Valentine. We are:

Chris Rockwell has been performing music and poetry across the country for the past ten years. He is a two time nationally competing slam poet, and in 2006 he won the title of Grand Slam Champion of New Jersey’s LOSER SLAM team. In 2009 he was the recipient of the Largesse Publishing Award, and in 2010 was named Poet Laureate of Asbury Park. Among other publications, he has been published in the globally recognized magazine, The Idiom. His two timeless loves are Sour Jacks candy, and Marilyn Monroe.

Joshua J Ballard is a writer and spoken word poet from New Jersey, a 2010 and 2011 Asbury Park Poet Laureate nominee, 2011 Grand Slam Poetry Champion of Loserslam, and member of their slam team which competed in Cambridge and Boston at National Poetry Slam in 2011 as well as New Jersey’s IWPS rep. He has been published in the internationally recognized and award winning poetry publication The Idiom Magazine, as well as The Viking News publication, has twice previously toured the country performing in slam venues, Walmart’s, bars, barbecues, coffee houses, alleys, libraries, homes, and even a winery. Oft times finding himself jogging, he usually discovers his meter through his uneven gait, attributed to a broken ankle which never did heal right.

We’ll see you Monday!

Poetrynight gathers every Monday night in The Amadeus Project, the non-profit school of composition located at 1209 Cornwall in downtown Bellingham. Sign-up is at 8:00, the show begins at 8:30. Won’t you have words with us?

Sometimes, people tell me they like the snow.  Then I’ll tell them there won’t be a reading this evening.

We will return next week, once the weather has become a little less… inclement. Matt Gano will return in the near future. Maybe this month. Maybe the next. We’ll keep you posted.

Until then, a poem:

The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow,
And what will the poor poets do then, poor things?
They’ll sit in their room and write their sad poems
and hide theirs heads until next week, poor things.

We’ll see you next Monday!

Poetrynight gathers (almost) every Monday night in The Amadeus Project, the non-profit school of composition located at 1209 Cornwall in downtown Bellingham. Sign-up is at 8:00, the show begins at 8:30. Won’t you have words with us? When it isn’t snowing?

In 2011, Matt Gano has guest lectured at The Juilliard School in New York City, featured for “Page Meets Stage,” at the Bowery Poetry Club, and led writing workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.  Matt has traveled internationally teaching creative writing and performance in Seoul, Korea, and in 2009 earned a three-month artist residency at the Lee Shau Kee, School of Creativity in Hong Kong.  Matt has worked as a national slam team coach and workshop instructor for Youth Speaks Seattle and is now a senior Artist in Residence with Seattle Arts and Lectures, Writers in the Schools.

A poem:

KINGS

We’ll see you Monday!

Poetrynight gathers every Monday night in The Amadeus Project, the non-profit school of composition located at 1209 Cornwall in downtown Bellingham. Sign-up is at 8:00, the show begins at 8:30. Won’t you have words with us?

Poetrynight always prepares for the inevitable. Global warming, nuclear war, the impending Mayan apocalypse; we’ve taken it all into consideration.  Which is why we present to you the poetrynight archives.  A small collection of work we have selected to preserve in the event of a global pandemic, robot uprising, geomagnetic reversal or some other doomsday scenario.

Grim stuff, we know. But it never hurts to be prepared.

In the meantime, you can wander the archives yourself,  and take heart knowing a million-million years from now, future archeologists will unearth this trove of collected works and they will know that we were here.  That we gathered on Monday nights to share of ourselves, that we were a fanciful people who believed our chests to be full of birds, our heads full of lions.



Have a look!

D. Antwan Stewart writes serious poems about serious subjects, adding humor whenever he can, but for some reason his poems are ornery and frequently flips him the finger whenever he courts laughter; so for balance he goes out to bars and allows folks to lick his face. Nevertheless, he still considers himself a “somewhat” accomplished poet, having been awarded fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and the Michener Center for Writers, where he earned—and he does mean “earned!”—the M.F.A. in poetry.

What you might expect from this reading is a lively banter between poems—since D. Antwan Stewart relishes being glib with a captive audience—especially when reading poems that appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Meridian, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, the Seattle Review, the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. III: Contemporary Appalachia, as well as from his two chapbooks: The Terribly Beautiful and Sotto Voce, each of which were selected for the Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series.

Being from the Bible belt, he relishes the idea of traveling to the Pacific Northwest, the farthest he’s ever been from home. He thinks he might like this cultural departure, and he just might stay if properly swayed. *wink*

Dawn

approaches like fingers finessing keys
of a baby grand

inside a pit of grief. Music,
a tragedy waging against the body—

like dahlias unfolding petals
in search of light

but failing to enter into that brightness.
So the body wounds. The heart

orders no affection for familiar kindness
as if this is the way to make sense

of the strangeness that is
the world, as if the world is the climax

and the orchestra enters
a fraction behind the beat.

We’ll see you Monday!

Poetrynight gathers every Monday night in The Amadeus Project, the non-profit school of composition located at 1209 Cornwall in downtown Bellingham. Sign-up is at 8:00, the show begins at 8:30. Won’t you have words with us?