While it is true that hardly anyone can earn a significant amount of money writing poetry, Tuesday after Tuesday poets gather at the Ventura Artists’ Union Gallery with their binders, notebooks and folded scraps of paper. They are drawn together, not by dreams of avarice, but by other desires. Words are their currency, traded on the stage. Along with the Tuesday Regulars, there is also a featured poet, and last Tuesday was an exceptional experience.

The format for the Tuesday gatherings is simple. The featured poet reads his or her poems first for about 20-25 minutes. This is followed by the open mic. The open mic has rules: each poet can share one poem and NO, I repeat, NO EPICS are allowed. Apparently, Doris will put the hurt on you if you go too long ;)

The featured poet this week was Carol V. Davis (bio below). Ms. Davis shared poems from her new book Between Storms (available at amazon.com). Ms. Davis is a very pleasant woman, with an engaging smile and an easy laugh. This Fulbright Scholar and T.S. Eliot Prize winner is currently teaching at Santa Monica College. She seemed at ease in front of the audience, and I was surprised when after reading two poems she mentioned that she was nervous when she first started reading. Ms. Davis also shared that Between Storms is a bit of a “darker” work, and I felt that in poems she shared with us. In the second stanza of the title poem, a storm is building:

A sweep of clouds darkens the sky,

On either side of the traffic

the canyon walls are growing.

The heavens could open now,

lightning bounce from the cheekbones of rocks

Scrub acorns sprout from the hillsides,

its stubble of beard sways unsteadily.

Ms. Davis’ work has been called “stark” and able to “conjure up the beauty amid the terror” (Enid Shomer), but she also shows us a humorous side in Singer and His Sewing Machine. This poem is about Isaac Merritt Singer, the inventor of the sewing machine, who lived a life in direct opposition to the products he created. “Model 7463 is called Confidence. Model 7436, Ingenuity. I’ll take one of each.” I found both her and her work wonderful. As Phil Taggart advised, and I agree, “Buy the book, buy the book.” If not for a million dollars, at least for a song.

http://www.venturaartistsunion.org/

Carol V. Davis is the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Her fascination with Russia, aided by a Fulbright grant, drew her to St Petersburg in the mid 1990s. Over the next decade, she divided her time between the US and Russia, where, as an American-born Jew, she was an outsider in Russian society.

Carol now lives in Los Angeles, California. Her poems have appeared in magazines in the US, Ireland and Israel. …In 1994 she received one of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience (USA) and also won the Reuben Rose Poetry Competition in Israel. In 1995 she won the Black Rock Press Broadside Competition, The Book Arts Press of the Univ. of Nevada. She is the author of a chapbook, Letters From Prague, (Paper Bag Press, 1991) based on the letters of Franz Kafka to his fiancée. She spent the 1996-97 academic year as a senior Fulbright scholar in creative writing in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she taught modern (19th and 20th century) Jewish literature at Petersburg Jewish University and wrote. Her book, It’s Time to Talk About…, was published in St. Petersburg, Russia in November, 1997, in a bilingual edition. In May, 2000 Ireland, she received the Strokestown Poetry Award, 2nd place, Co. Roscommon, Ireland.

Source: http://theshop.free-jazz.net/carol-v-davis-into-the-arms-of-pushkin-poems-of-st-petersburg/shop/poetry-books/

Keeping it Real

Thursday, March 15, 2012

A Night at the Gallery - March 13, 2012