The Apostrophe Blog
To celebrate twenty years of the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in November 2024, Printed Matter Vancouver and Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic co-hosts Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, and Morgan Paige have collected poems from ones read by Ghost Town readers over the years for their third anthology. My poem, “Gift Event for Our New Gilded Age,” will be featured in this collection. This poem was previously published in the Celebration Issue of Raven Chronicles, A Journal of Art, Literature & The Spoken Word, Vol. 22, Spring/Summer 2016 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Kwakiutl Indian “Gift Event”—upon which this poem is based—appears in the second edition of Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania edited by Jerome Rothenberg.
In addition, the anthology editors asked Ghost Town readers to share a memory they have from their evening at the Poetry Open Mic. Below is mine from two days after that fateful election of November 2016…
Memorable Experience at a Ghost Town Poetry Reading
Kristin Berger and I were featured readers on the clear, starry night of November 10, 2016. It was a mere two days after the shocking results in that year’s Presidential election, an outcome whose consequences (I would argue) are still reverberating throughout—and troubling—our country (if not the entire world) today.
To me, the mood at the reading felt sober. People seemed upset, fearful, uncertain, vulnerable, stunned. I remember that how good it felt that we were gathering in community, how good it felt to be among so many others who valued the written word, poetry, and art. People who would take time out of their busy days and lives to sit in a room with strangers and listen to others bravely read their heartfelt thoughts aloud.
I started my reading with the following words: “This has not been an easy couple of days. In fact, on the morning after Election Day, I revisited the poems I’ll be reading tonight.” And I ended with these words: “Thank you for listening. And thank you for caring about poetry in this sadly heartless time. Words do matter.” I remember that I felt shaken by the time I finished; it was as if the previous forty-eight hours had caught up with me and walloped me over the head right there in the front of that room. I think I remember choking up a bit, too. Perhaps others in the room were tearful as well.
There was no place on earth I would rather have been that night than in that space at the Angst Gallery with what felt, to me, like so many like-minded souls. Love, generosity, kindness, and compassion were in abundance and then some—truly a blessing. It doesn’t get much better than that.
The public domain photograph above is of the main street in the ghost town of Crescent, Michigan and was likely taken between the 1890s and the 1910s.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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