Did I forget to tell you Yusef came to town?

Spokane's annual Get Lit! festival was a few weeks ago. Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry reading (April 21 in Cheney) was amazing. His deep, resonating voice was mesmerizing . . . which if you don't get turned on by poetry, you won't really understand what I mean.

Fun fact question: what do Yusef and I both have in common, besides a love of reading and writing poetry? We both had the same creative writing professor. Christopher Howell was Yusef's teacher at Colorado State long ago...now Chris teaches in the MFA program at Eastern. Chris's Lynx House Press also published Yusef's first book of poems, Lost in the Bonewheel Factory.

I also heard Julie Gamberg read poems from her new (and first) book, The Museum of Natural History. I highly recommend it if you enjoy lyrical poetry--you can buy it direct from EWU Press. She opened up for Nancy Pearl, who was very witty and engaging. Then Saturday night there was a late-night poetry reading at The Davenport Hotel. And then...the following Tuesday, Donald Hall (yes, Donald Hall!) gave a poetry reading at Whitworth College! Man, it was poetry heaven in Spokane! All my favorite poet/writer friends were in attendance and I shook Donald's hand, he signed my two books (Without and his book of essays), and was such an enjoyable man. Because of his age (Robert Frost was his teacher at Bread Loaf...he's almost 80 years old), I suspect he may not be giving too many more poetry readings outside of his general hometown area. So I felt very honored to have heard him read his work, plus his witty transitionary banter between his poems. (Here's a neat interview with Donald Hall.)

And to give you a taste of Julie's style, here are some of my favorite lines:

"I am not a twin and have never felt part of something larger. When I look up I do not contemplate the universe and feel tiny. I am always wide open. I am enormous."

- the last section "Pepper Shaker" from a prose (?) poem called "From the House (I)"

* * *

"The sky looms heavy as steel-toed boots.
Some years smear into the ones before and since.
A decade constructed out of smudged coffee grounds,
yellow nicotine stain, red wine spills everywhere.

It's so cold today, the sky
crammed beneath my skin."

- from "Fast Forward. Rewind. Repeat."