Summer Poetry Workshop Series

We All Belong Here:  Poems of Kindness and Connection
How can we be kind, or make connections with each other, even when to be compassionate is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even dangerous?  Using poems from Healing the Divide (edited by James Crews) and others as prompts, and our own drafts as examples, this workshop will explore how shared poetry can counteract exclusions, encourage equity, and give us strength to carry on in troubling times.

Gary Thomas will facilitate this workshop on Saturday, July 18 from 1:00-2:30 on Zoom. We will send out a Zoom invitation earlier that week as an email blast and on our Facebook page.

Poetry Book Club

Our MoSt Summer Book Club is back on Wednesday, July 15, 2020 at 6:30, and you don’t even have to drive to the library because it is a Zoom meeting!

We’ll be discussing Natasha Tretheway’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Native Guard. There are copies available to borrow at the Modesto Public Library. If you’d like one, please email Vicki, our most wonderful librarian contact, at vsalinas@stanlibrary.org.

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South — where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history. (from the Houghton Mifflin website)

We’ll send out the Zoom invite via Mailchimp and our Facebook page later this month, so stay tuned!

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – On Zoom!

We will be holding our Second Tuesday poetry reading series on July 14th, 2020, via Zoom. We hope you’ll join us. Please see the flyer above for more information on our featured poets, Connie Post and Michael Meyerhofer.

Live links for reading here:
For the open mic: https://padlet.com/beratliss/j0ynareusug2u61c
For the Zoom reading: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/99196095308

MoSt Annual Meeting

Our Annual Meeting is open to all MoSt members! Join us for a Zoom meeting on Sunday, July 12 at 3:00. We’ll be reflecting on the past year, discussing new initiatives, electing/re-electing board members, and getting excited about all the MoSt events we have planned.

If you would like to attend, please RSVP to info@mostpoetry.org with MEETING in the subject line, and we’ll send you the Zoom invite. If you are unable to attend, but interested in all the goings-on, we can send you the minutes as soon as those are available. And, of course, if you are interested in becoming part of our board, please let us know!

Jun 30

Amplify Black Poets, Day 26

Highflown:Love

by Eugene B. Redmond

In the highflown language
Of moon travelers
Social Scientists sort our hurts—
Add their smog-crippled vision—
And rearrange our private pains
Along the Wall Street of current demands:
And my people become the
Cocaine that makes America high:
Become dreams
America sucks through maniacal straws of sleep;
Discounting our lore,
The scientists say we cannot love
                say our needs are numbed:
But, sometimes,
When you construct knots in my throat
And your lips re-create my heartclock
I am hypnotized by the aggregate passion
Of my past     by the sun of my historical ecstasy:
A power we know
Cannot be stilled by airborne theories of scholars
Nestled in Freudian citadels
A power that cannot be seen
Heard
Or flattened to fit the pages of a book

From: THE EYE IN THE CEILING: SELECTED POEMS. Harlem River Press, 1991

Most Poetry will post a poem by a Black poet each day through the month of June.