Calliope

Calliope, a community for poets, presents its next reading Sunday, May 10, 3 to 5 PM at the West Falmouth Library. Featured poets include Pushcart Prize winner Martha Collins who has been called “one of our most vibrant poets”; Lee Sharkey, whose Calendars of Fire was a Recommended Poetry Book of 2013; and Jason Tandon, whose poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Open mic sign up is at 2:45 PM. $5 suggested donation.

Pushcart Prize winner Martha Collins is the author of Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), a book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old. Blue Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library. Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press. In Spring 2010 she served as Distinguished Visting Writer at Cornell University. Poet Kevin Prufer described Day Unto Day as “Musically brilliant, psychologically intricate, movingly humane” and noted that reading Day Unto Day “is like listening in on the meditations of a nimble, restless mind hurtling through time. . . . Martha Collins is one of our most vital poets. Poet Kazim Ali noted the pleasure of “attention” that characterizes the poetry of Day Unto Day: “its attentions are intellectual, sonice, architectural deeply spiritual.” Some Things Words Can Do:  Play. Teach us? / to play. Play for us. / Take us. Take us in.? / Take us out. Introduce us. / Make something ?/ of us. Make us ours. / Leave us. Leave / ?us wanting.  

In 1974, Lee Sharkey bought a hundred-year-old Pearl platen press, taught herself to set type and print, and produced over the course of a long Maine winter her first poetry chapbook. Lee is the recipient of the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Award in Translation (2013), the 2010 Maine Arts Commission's Individual Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts and the 1997 Rainmaker Award in Poetry, judged by Carolyn Forché. Since 2003 she has co-edited the Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest and most respected poetry journals.  Of her poetry collection A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008), Calyx Journal said, “"Echoing Carolyn Forché's poetry of witness, the poems in Lee Sharkey’s A Darker, Sweeter String are imbued with a yearning for peace, and while war in its many faces is omnipresent in these beautifully wrought poems, so also is the sense of hope. . . . A Darker, Sweeter String, a collection that embodies the spirit that we can resolve what rends us, is a must read." Coldfront Magazine called it “one of the best books of the year." Calendars of Fire is a Split This Rock Recommended Poetry Book of 2013, and won honorable mention for both the Sheila Motton and Eric Hoffer Book Awards.  From In the Wind: The forest is sloughing dead to make room for the sun. / And you, bent there to gather branches, / have always been walking / the dark woods children hurry through / to get where they are going— / yet the forest is the coming and the going. 

Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry: Quality of Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, winner of the 2006 St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2009), and Wee Hour Martyrdom (sunnyoutside, 2008). In addition to publication in numerous journals, his poems have been featured on Verse Daily and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. He teaches in the College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program at Boston University.  Poet Kevin Prufer wrote, “The poems in Jason Tandon’s Quality of Life meditate on loss, love, the complexities of memory…They speak of our need to hold onto moments of clarity, epiphany, or self-knowledge even as they slip past us. These poems… are acutely observed, thoughtful, occasionally whimsical, and composed with elegance, fine music, and grace. Quality of Life is a delight.” This meditative gaze upon loss and love is evident in the poems Perigee and Fatherhood, Beginnings. Perigee: “ What sounds like a parent ?/ wailing over a lost child / is a call to diminish distance: ?/ Here I am, come. / Here I am, come.” Fatherhood, Beginnings: “What will I tell my son?/ when he asks if I am happy??/ All summer I mowed the lawn like my father / in shorts and socks pulled taut to the knee. / I want to tell the girl across the street / to quit smoking, / to straighten her shoulders when she walks,?/ to stop shuffling her feet.”