99 Poems on the Bus T-shirts

Bay Area bus riders, come to Mrs. Dalloways on Oct 2 to purchase your own 99 Poems for the 99 Percent on the Bus T-shirts. Also hear Matthew Zapruder, Maxine Chernoff, Tess Taylor, Heather Altfeld, and Troy Jollimore read good poems!

99 Poems Comes to Kepler's

The legendary Kepler's in Menlo Park hosted six contributors to the 99 Poems anthology on September 18. Readers included Ellen Bass, Sally Ashton, J. P. Dancing Bear, Rachelle Escamilla, and Dennis Richardson.  Every available seat was taken! Readers signed books, met with old friends, and answered questions about poetry and politics.

Ellen Bass talks about her father's long employment history in "My Father's Day"

Dennis Richardson talks about both Frogs and the French

Rachelle Escamilla dazzled everyone with her poem and her stories about growing up with immigrant parents

Sally Ashton reads Brian Clement's poem "A February Revolution"

J. P. Dancing Bear reads "By a Monkey on a Unicycle"

99 Poems for the 99 Percent Invades Santa Cruz

On September 8, several contributors to 99 Poems for the 99 Percent marched on Santa Cruz, taking over Bookshop Santa Cruz. Below are photos released last week by Gawker:

Sally Ashton reads her poem in Three Voices

Joan Gelfand tells the 1% to talk to the hand.

CJ Sage reads from her poem "To Occupy: An Advice"

Podcast of 99 Poems Anthology read on KUSP Poetry Show

Hear Santa Cruz legend Dennis Morton read poems from 99 Poems for the 99 Percent on the nation's oldest poetry-only radio show. http://blogs.kusp.org/poetryshow/

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Images from the San Francisco Reading and Release Party for 99 Poems for the 99 Percent - Sept 3, 2014

Julie Bruck wows the crowd of the Booksmith

Keith Ekiss reads a poem about the Mission District

Barbara Berman imagines Walt Whitman on Wall Street

Barbara, Julie, and Hiya can't take their eyes off of Gillian Conoley

99 Poems for the 99 Percent hits #2 on the SPD Bestseller List

99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry is at #2 on the Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller List and comes in at the very top of the "SPD Recommends" page.

Dana Levin, Rich Bouchet, and Jon Davis read from 99 Poems for the 99 Percent!

99 Poems for the 99 Percent, held the first of many reading/release parties at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design on July 26, 2014. Jon Davis, Rich Bouchet, Dana Levin, and Dean Rader read their own poems from the anthology as well as work by Bob Hicok, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Camille T. Dungy, Alexandra Teague, and several others:

Jon Davis adopts a creepy persona in his fabulous poem "Preliminary Report from the Committee on Appropriate Postures for the Suffering"

Rich Bouchet adopts an even creepier persona for his poem "Gently Now, Gently, Gently Into Your Black Tactical Duty Jacket, Your Striped Plunge Bra with Cherry Charm"

Dana Levin adopts her always cool persona for her haunting poem "Morning News."

Memory/Memorial, Ingrid Wendt

MEMORY/MEMORIAL

Ingrid Wendt

You whose family four years fled through jungles, whose mother,

Camp by camp, weakened, the cancer left to spread, untreated

You, whose mother fled with her children from Russian invasion

Your train bombed and bombed again as it inched its way south

You whose daughter disappeared on her everyday route home.

You to whom a government gave blankets riddled with smallpox

You whom radiation ravaged, whose fatherland won’t remember

You for whom the midnight knock on the door will echo forever

You for whom the syllables Tiananmen, Kent State, still smolder

You whose generation’s memory is short

You who cannot bear the sound of movie gunfire, cars’ backfires

You who’ve gathered together severed limbs from the wreckage

The swamp water; you, family whose mourning can never begin

You who never again will look into cameras, you who have seen

More of the face of evil than anything minds can begin to imagine

You who look for reasons where none exist, who bring to these

Elegies, images of your own, too deep for speech, wave upon

Wave they return when least you expect them, flotsam weighing

The future down. What shape do we give to horror, what form?

Silence between the paving stones of these stanzas: this is for you.

About "Memory/Memorial," Ingrid Wendt writes:

" Throughout human history, with all of its changes, one thing is constant in every country in the world: for every horror, every death, caused by other human beings – from large-scale warfare to airline crashes to the kidnapping and murder of a child coming home from school – there are those left behind who remember, who mourn, who often are isolated in their grief and in their inability to give shape to it.

This poem belongs to a 10-part poem sequence: my part of a collaborative project with a sculptor and painter in 1999. The horrors I refer to are events in the Philippines and Germany during and after the second world war, in China, Chile, Argentina, the United States during the Indian wars, and the United States today. For this poem, I created all lines (except one) of nearly equal length, to resemble paving stones of an imagined path.”

99 POEMS FOR THE 99 PERCENT: AN ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY - NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE

99 Poems for the 99 Percent, the popular blog begun by Dean Rader, is now available in book form, complete with notes about the poems written by the poets themselves. With contributions by Edward Hirsch, Dana Levin, Timothy Donnelly, Bob Hicok, Rachel Loden, Maxine Chernoff, Camille T. Dungy, Patty Seyburn, Rey Gonzalez, Matthew Zapruder, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Alexandra Teague, Jon Davis, Tess Taylor, Keith Ekiss, Joan Houlihan, Fred Marchant, Martha Collins, Robert Pinsky, LeAnne Howe, and a host of other writers, this collection represents one of the most pertinent and topical collaboration of poetry and politics.

Order your copy today from Small Press Distribution or Amazon