So much suffering pervades the world, bad newsinvades our mindstream. Searching for how to helpwe still need ways to gain some equanimity. My way: pack a water bottle, pen and paperin an old cloth bag to sit on later,set off for a slow-paced forest walk. Wild cucumber blooms along the pathtwinberry branches drape across the […]
poetry
Posted inPoetry
Beyond Reason
Hydrogen enlightenedAll we can possibly see, When nothing created everything. As I plod along now decipheringAll the clueless information One thing is clear: Somehow we are all a part ofSomething wonderful forever… I can live with that! — Kirk Gothier
Posted inPoetry
Waxwings
The dawn after you diedThe cedar waxwings cameFirst one, then a dozen, then a throngThe cotoneaster, twenty-thousand berries strongSupported them easily The tree got taller as the birds got fullerThen the empty-nester stood too tallTo see its flock dig up their leavingsFrom the ground below Six feet under another treeTwenty-thousand secondsSince life felled youLies a […]
Posted inFeature
A Table for All
David Holper’s Bord för En At the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, a Swedish pop-up restaurant opened in an open field. There, a basket of food was sent to just one person at a time via cable. Bord för en, Swedish for “table for one,” closed on Aug. 1, 2020. In his fourth collection of […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Redwood Poetry Festival Takes the Stage
Wil Gibson fell in love with poetry at the age of 8 when he saw the poet laureate of Chicago belting out verse. But as a young adult living on the streets, he felt a divide between his social standing and his literary dreams. “I never thought poetry was something I could have,” Gibson says. […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Won’t Fade Away
Poetry is a discipline that escapes my writing and, like anything out there minted in a different factory than my own creative forge, intrigues me. Looking through the windows at the production line, I’ve seen quite a few shapes of blurry contradiction that seem to make up the important qualities of the form, once you […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Annette Makino’s Life in Collage
Annette Makino has been an artist all her life but it wasn’t until 2010 that she became interested in incorporating haiku into her artwork. For her birthday that year, her Arcata friend and fellow artist Amy Uyeki gave her a book of senryu, a poetic form structurally similar to haiku but with more humor and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Open-Air Poetry Reading with David Holper
Even money you don’t have enough poetry or fresh air in your life right now. Get both on Saturday, Sept. 30, at 1 p.m. at 4007 Cedar St. in Eureka, where David Holper will be reading from his new book of poems Language Lessons: A Linguistic Hejira. Bring a lawn chair and settle in for […]
Posted inNews
Artist, Poet, Activist and Karuk Ceremonial Singer Brian Tripp has Died
After a long and painful battle with illness, 77-year-old Brian D. Tripp, born in Eureka and raised in Klamath, died May 13. A nationally renowned artist whose work echoed traditional forms in painting and sculpture, Tripp was the 2018 recipient of the California Living Heritage Award from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts. His mural “The […]
Posted inNews
‘Given These Songs’
Brian Tripp, the storied Karuk poet, artist and ceremonial singer, is in hospice, receiving care provided for people who doctors think are in last months of life with an incurable disease. In many cases, hospice care is cause for abject sadness from the patient and their family. For Brian, it was reason to invite some […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Pandemic Poetry Reading with Laureate David Holper
When the city council appointed David Holper Eureka’s first poet laureate in 2019, it was supposed to last a year. Then again, a lot of things turned out differently than planned in 2020 and the term was extended. You can watch Holper’s live reading via Zoom and on Public Access Channel 8 on Tuesday, April […]
Posted inNews
Public Art as Community Care
The Eureka Street Art Festival galvanized the Henderson Center neighborhood with new visions and unfamiliar words. Quarantine kept the focus of this year’s renewal local, which presented an opportunity for organizers to assemble an eclectic group of local visual artists and poets. The 12 new murals and eight poetry installations they produced over the course […]