April: National Poetry Month

The Cultural Council celebrated National Poetry Month through a series of readings with its 2012-13 Poet Laureate David Swanger. In addition to presenting readings to the City Councils of Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz, Capitola, and Watsonville, as well as the County Board of Supervisors, Swanger appeared at numerous literary events, including:

An Evening of Poems about Places

Tuesday, April 17^th at 7pm (Doors at 6:45pm)

Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar Street, Santa Cruz

Featuring 2012-13 Poet Laureate David Swanger and

2010-11 Poet Laureate Gary Young

Moderated by Dennis Morton, producer of the KUSP Poetry Show

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

A Community Reading with San Lorenzo Valley Poetry

Thursday, April 26^th at 7pm

Felton Community Hall, 6191 Highway 9

Organized by the Felton Library Friends

More events to come! Check back soon...

We were thrilled to introduce renowned poet and longtime Santa Cruz County resident David Swanger as our 2012-13 Poet Laureate. During his term, Swanger will act as an advocate for poetry, literature and the arts, and contribute to Santa Cruz County’s poetry and literary legacy.

“I am honored to be chosen by the Cultural Council and Poetry Santa Cruz as the second Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate; and it is a privilege to succeed Gary Young in this position,” says Swanger of this appointment. “We have a wonderfully varied, accomplished and vital cohort of poets in Santa Cruz. I look forward to working with my colleagues on a range of endeavors — Santa Cruz’ reading series, publications, commemorations, festivals and other celebrations.

While the county is rich in poets and poetry organizations, there are other groups with whom I'd also like to share poems, talk about poetry, and, in some instances, write poems. These groups include students in high schools, including alternative schools; librarians and their patrons, civic and business organizations, churches, synagogues, and other places of religion. Generally, I hope to contribute to poetry's presence throughout both Santa Cruz proper and South County. Most of all, I anticipate joy in being an official emissary on behalf of poetry.”

David has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. He has written a book about poetry, The Poem as Process, and a book about aesthetic education, Essays in Aesthetic Education, as well as four books of poems. His most recent book of poems, Wayne’s College of Beauty, won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry. Wayne’s College of Beauty was also a finalist in Fore Word’s Book of the Year Awards. Two of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac.”

To purchase works by David Swanger, visit his Amazon store.

Natural Disaster

(January 1982, Santa Cruz County)

Overflow advances across strawberry

fields, insinuates streets and suddenly

everyone has a house on the water.  And

such rich, redolent water, water carrying

land with it, effluents, aromas, stranded

cars, bodies in cars; water driving snakes

ahead of it, water augering through levees

and piling the fluid tonnage of itself against

bridges that break, great trees that swim

away from the bank and ride the roiling

surface until they are snagged by other

trees and slam sideways, trees logging up

into dams over which the river schusses.

The names of the creeks: Lompico, Bear

Soquel, Zayante, Kings, Two Bar, Empire,

Aptos, Granite.  And the rivers: Pajaro,

San Lorenzo.  The names of the dead:

George, Leon, Sheila, Juan, Unknown and

Unknown.  The names of the gods: Jaweh,

Father, Holy Spirit.  The name of the lake

on whose bank grows a tree said to form

an image of the Virgin Mary in its bark:

Pinto.  The name of the lucky one, not

home when his house slid over the edge:

Robert.  The name of the thing that brings

the rivers up and the hills down: rain.

Wayne's College of Beauty

I know what wages beauty gives

--Yeats

We have dropped out of the other schools

to enroll here where no one fails; everything

is fixed, fluffed, teased into its temporary best

at cut-rate prices because we are all novices

in the art of making beauty, learning that beauty

is not so hard.  Beauty is not so hard we learn,

because it is not chemicals or varieties of fashion.

Our scissors and combs, our libraries of lotions,

our bright mirrors assure the timorous or imperious

elderly they have come at last to the right place.

Wayne's is not the Heartbreak Hotel, and when they

leave beautiful, it is because they are briefly unlonely.

We have said, "How are you?", "How would you

like your hair?", and we have touched them not cruelly,

and with more than our hands. When it is over

we swivel their chairs so they can see themselves

carefully from several angles while we hover silent

just above their doubts, a calculation that provides

two faces in the mirror, ours smiling at both of us.

The Poet Laureate program is presented in collaboration with the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, Poetry Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz County Office of Education, and Santa Cruz County Parks Department.