Celebrating National Poetry Month— Plus
Tuesdays With Writers Group Reading
April 7, 2009 at The South Mill from 7:00-8:45 p.m.


· It might be fun to come with pocketsize poems or stories in your shirt pockets or stuffed into jean pockets. Little tales are like poems, right? My students and I wrote six-word memoirs this week. Many wrote several more than the five required. What fun those would be for adults! If this idea doesn’t suit you, bring in your own treasures. Please bring in poetry you admire but did not write.

Examples of six-word memoirs found online:

Fight, work, persevere—
Gain slight notoriety.

Big hair, big heart, big hurry.

Bespectacled, besneakered, ran and danced around.

Still make coffee for two.

Gone dreaming, leave message at tone.

Couldn’t cope so wrote songs.


· There is a 5-minute limit per reader. Please be respectful to other writers by staying at 5 minutes please. We like to fill the house and do not want to leave anyone out or shorten his or her reading experience. Let us be kind and mindful of many voices. Perhaps some of you might want to read as a team. Imagine a choral reading of two or more. What fun.

· Contact Deborah McGinn now to reserve a spot to participate. dmcginn@lps.org

AND, future events:

MAY: The Chaparral Poets (seven readers!) ...

JUNE: Nebraska writer/teacher/musician/whisperer-of-poetry-to-horses BEN GOTSCHALL ... BEN grew up on a cattle ranch and dairy in the Sandhills of Holt County, Nebraska. He earned a degree in English from Nebraska Wesleyan University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Idaho. He is the author of Where It Happened (Lewis-Clark Press/Sandhills Press, 2008). His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2007, Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses, Meridian, Nimrod, South Dakota Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Southeast, and The MeadoW. Currently a Visiting Professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, he is also the herdsman on Branched Oak farm near Raymond.

He has a book out, WHERE IT HAPPENED, in February, 2009:

" Here is the voice of a young writer whose connection with the Nebraska Sandhills rings vibrant and true. And here is an eye that sees the remarkable clarity. "A sparrow perches// on the leg of an upturned milkstool." Yes. "...she chewed sunflower/ seeds and spit the shells/ at my boots." Again, yes. Ben Gotschall's poems are free verse that sings, and each song is a tribute to the land no less than to those who serve as its caretakers-father, mother, sister, grandparents, and especially his brother Marcus, whose skill and commitment as a calf roper are extensions of his family history. And it is our family history also, because Gotschall's treatment of the Sandhills embodies the complex environments of innocence, initiation, passion, and death, universal subjects he treats as surely as his brother handles a rope-with undaunted honesty and grace." — William Kloefkorn, NE State Poet

"The poems in Benjamin Gotschall's elegiac debut collection, Where it Happened, are deeply rooted in a language of place, of work, and of a rough-hewn life. The vision here is direct and unflinching as it measures loss and takes stock of what is left. Gotschall is a poet who knows well the possibility of poetry to "find, gather [and] replace what we've lost in vivid, reverent words." — Natasha Trethewey

Ben's website: http://www.holtcreekjerseys.com/

JULY: Tuesdays With Writers celebrates 10 years! Another Famous GROUP reading! ...

AUGUST: Taylor Mignon: Published poet in Hummingbird, Pearl, Light and online with Dust Books. She "may even have my first poetry volume published by then from Printed Matter Press, Tokyo." She is putting together a manuscript of poems by modernist/surrealist Torii Shozo, most likely from highmoon press. As an editor, she co-edited/ advised Japan theme issues with Prairie Schooner, Vallum: contemporary poetry and Atlanta Review.