Writing at Centrum

Poet Gary Lilley to Read at Wheeler Theater

Poet Gary Lilley, who has been in-residence in the Port Townsend schools since January 16, will capstone his visit with a public reading at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater on Saturday, January 31, at 7 pm.

Lilley, a Copper Canyon Press poet, is the author of four books: Black Poem, Alpha Zulu, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues.

Lilley has been a poet-in-residence at WritersCorps, Young Chicago Authors, and The Poetry Center of Chicago, and received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He teaches Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College.

The reading is free.

Letter from Havana

By David Romtvedt

"Missionaries"

In June I was in Havana as part of a four piece band that included my friends Mona and Ryc, and my daughter Caito.  We were traveling under the auspices of Cuba AyUUda, a First Unitarian Church of Portland program meant to build mutual understanding between Cubans and Americans.  The problem with going to Cuba to build understanding is that the United States government has for nearly fifty years conducted a blockade against Cuba that includes forbidding travel to that country by US citizens.  So if you’re American you can’t go to Cuba to do anything. 

But there are loopholes.  The U.S. Treasury department authorizes certain travel “licenses.”  Americans can go to Cuba to attend international conferences, do academic research, or carry out cultural, educational, and religious projects.  Or they used to be able to.  The administration of George W. Bush canceled almost all licenses except those granted to church groups engaged in full time evangelical missionary work.

5/26: Ted Kooser Reading

Ted Kooser—Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States—will give a reading with award-winning Michigan poet Dan Gerber at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater on Saturday, May 26, at 7 pm. Tickets will be available at the door thirty minutes before the reading begins. For more information on Ted and Dan, visit Copper Canyon Press.

Arthur Sze On Ancient Inca and Chinese Narratives

A poet is above all else passionate about language. And quipus have been my recent vehicle to explore what language can do.

The eleventh edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines a quipu as “a device made of a main cord with smaller varicolored cords attached and knotted and used by the ancient Peruvians (as for calculating).” The word quipu is from Quechua and means knot.  

I became interested in quipus many years ago when I discovered that quipus might encode language. In my last book, Quipu (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), I was interested in harnessing dyed strings of language along with forms of knotting. One form of knotting, it seemed to me, could be simple anaphoric repetition. In the next-to-last section of “Didyma,” I used the word “because” fifteen times to initiate a series of causes, then I used a section divider to create a gap before presenting fifteen different effects. Because no cause leads clearly to a subsequent effect, no one is able to see the universal nexus of causes and effects.

In the title poem, “Quipu,” I employed a different form of knotting where the word “as” is used again and again, with varying meanings. The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary lists three meanings of “as” as an adverb and eight meanings of “as” as a conjunction. I utilized the word “as” in each of its possible meanings and then revealed them in section seven. My wife, the poet Carol Moldaw, studied with Robert Fitzgerald at Harvard and has often mentioned how he talked about “elegant variation” as a means to create rich layers in poetry. I thought of repetition with a twist and consciously worked with this polysemous form of knotting when I kept repeating the word “as.”