Coming soon from Korrektiv Press, a two-volume set of poems and pictures chronicling a year of rising with the sun — by Jonathan Potter
Poetry Workshop with Mark Anderson
September 18, 2022 by at 3:07 pm
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2022, 2:30 PM – 4 PM
Boots Bakery & Lounge, 24 W. Main St., Spokane, Washington
Come write with former Spokane Poet Laureate Mark Anderson.
Has writer’s block got you down? Have you been plagued by a case of immobile pen since you graduated an MFA ten years ago? Want to write your first poem and you don’t know how? In this drop-in and beginner-friendly workshop series we will be reading great poems and launching into generative writing prompts. It’s important to me that participants will leave having discovered great poems and fresh perspectives on poetry, and having looked at how we can incorporate small bits of meaning into our own writing practices. This is a space for exploration, and for treating each piece of writing like a new adventure. $25 suggested (pay whatever is feasible and sustainable for you)
Cover Art by Tiffany Patterson
May 27, 2022 by at 5:16 pm
Design by Thom Caraway
For the book by Mark L. Anderson
Soon to be published by Korrektiv Press
Blurbs
April 23, 2021 by at 3:37 pm
When I asked GK for a blurb
I worried that I might disturb
The genius at work—
But he didn’t shirk
Providing a blurb so superb.
And then there’s that Jonathan J.
Whose blurb lit some fire to my hay
For a great conflagration
Of sweet adulation
And mythmaking making the day.
Now Ms. Wright can blurb with the best
And her blurb came last but impressed
With fantastic words
That gave flight to birds
From a Petrarchan palimpsest nest.
Tulips Sans Chimneys
April 7, 2021 by at 8:48 am
Mr. Potter’s given us a bold adventurous book with plenty of sharp turns at high speed, with some gestures toward Neruda and Merwin but also “Sk8,” a gr8 skateboarding poem, and sonnets, and brave ventures into rhymed verse, poems for friends and relatives, “Stopping by Blogs on a Frosty Evening,” and poems of passionate love with angels looking down from above. Plus tulips and Elsie. —Garrison Keillor
I have enjoyed the company of Jonathan Potter’s poetry for years and rejoice at the arrival of this new collection with its unabashed delight, authentic intimacy, and emotionally convincing, often playful music. Potter is at turns a graceful, organic monologist and a wry, deft formalist. These are poems of generous mythmaking, self-deprecating humor, passion, and the glories of fatherhood. They inhabit a Seattle of historical icons and the poet’s own skateboarding youth, a London of “tidy grime” and love, and the derelict and divine streets and poetry community and waterfall of Spokane, this poet’s answer to Williams’ Paterson. By the time Potter wishes he could “become myself with vengeance / and take you with me,” he has done both. —Jonathan Johnson
In an era of poetry that plumbs humanity’s darker depths, it is a pleasant respite to read Jonathan Potter’s Tulips for Elsie, a collection that wears its pathos and its prosody lightly as it confronts life’s familiar concerns—love, sex, family life, and his beloved native place (Spokane, Washington)— with full-bodied affection and gentle irony. Many poems here are sonnets—not just Petrarchan or Shakespearean but also Onegin stanzas!—yet Potter makes rhyming in these conversationally-toned fourteeners look effortless. Particularly engaging are the portrait sonnets featuring poets and writers associated with Spokane (Alexie, Howell, Walter among them), the longer poems about the poet’s lively and accomplished daughters, and the poetic palimpsests replying to or parodying well-known classics. By the time we finish reading, we may feel ourselves, with the poet, to have “co-authored . . . a beautiful book of longing.” —Carolyne Wright
A reading of Sherman Alexie’s “That Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump”
February 27, 2021 by at 12:15 pm
Pictures of [Korrektiv] Poets
May 3, 2019 by at 1:18 am
Three Two One Zero
March 9, 2019 by at 1:44 pm
What the Sky Lacks
December 29, 2018 by at 4:00 pm
What the Sky Lacks: poems by Thom Caraway, new from Korrektiv Press and now available from Amazon; soon from other fine booksellers everywhere.
What Came in the Mail
February 7, 2017 by at 2:38 am
From JOB, for Christmas … with a note that perhaps I have an affinity for Eastern Europeans, to which I can say, Yes, I certainly do. I hadn’t read much of M. Codrescu. Know of him primarily because of his NPR gig, of course, and something he’d written in connection with New Orleans. Leafing through the table of contents, the title “dream dogs” caught my eye, which turned out to be a good choice because it is (a) short, and (b) consists of lines that are entirely left-justified, which is makes reproducing it in this post much easier.
dream dogs
years ago it was easy to dream of wolves
and wake up your lover
to show him the blood on your hip.
the wolves had ties
and followed after every sentence
rather polite.
now there are police dogs
using tear gas and the lover next to you
doesn’t wake up.
ME: I like it. Thinking that it must have been written with a woman in mind, I flip back a few pages and learn that it’s from a section named for a former wife, Alice Henderson-Codrescu. Naturally, this interests me, and so I read a few more.
reverse
the storm outside
must be the kind you read about in the newspapers,
killer of babies and bums.
the kind of rain that goes in the subway
when i hold on to the coat of a fat man
whose disastrous life
makes me happy.
ME: Not much to do with the wife, as far as I can tell, but the alliteration in “babies and bums” catches my ear, and the schadenfreude my heart … although I’ve put on a few pounds this last year, so …
zzzzzzzzzzzz
i want to touch something sensational
like the mind of a shark. the white
electric bulbs of hunger moving
straight to the teeth.
and let there be rain that day over new york.
there is no other way
i can break away from bad news
and cheap merchandise.
(the black woman with a macy’s shopping bag
just killed me
from across the street.)
it is comfortable to want
peace from the mind of a shark.
ME: I like this one, too, although I don’t have much of an idea about what it means. The title leads me to suspect it is perhaps a version of a dream he’s had, and now I wonder whether all of the poems in this section are based on dreams, since we have it in the title of the first poem above, and the imagery in each of the poems has sort of chaos we often experience in dreams. The lower case letters bring to mind W.S. Merwin, but Codrescu’s poems contain a great deal more of life as most of us find it. He isn’t trying for the sublime in every line, and in fact seems to be trying to avoid anything that might signify portentousness. So yes, I like it. Not as much as JOB’s own poetry, but I’ll be dipping back into this volume until I see more from him.
Thanks JOB!
This sounds vaguely familiar…
October 18, 2016 by at 9:31 pm
But I could swear it takes place on the West Coast – in a place like Seattle or something…
Mark Anderson in the Spokesman-Review