BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Coleman Barks, who lives in Georgia, is not only the English language's foremost translator of the poems of the 13th century poet, Rumi, but he's also a loving grandfather, and for me that's even more important. His poems about his granddaughter, Briny, are brim full of joy. Here's one:


Glad

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer
field her team, the Gladiators, is losing

ten to zip. She never loses interest in
the roughhouse one-on-one that comes

every half a minute. She sticks her leg
in danger and comes out the other side running.

Later a clump of opponents on the street is chant-
ing, WE WON, WE WON, WE . . . She stands up

on the convertible seat holding to the wind-
shield. WE LOST, WE LOST BIGTIME, TEN TO

NOTHING, WE LOST, WE LOST. Fist pumping
air. The other team quiet, abashed, chastened.

Good losers don't laugh last; they laugh
continuously, all the way home so glad.


American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c)2001 by Coleman Barks, from his most recent book of poems, "Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008," University of Georgia Press, 2008, and reprinted by permission of Coleman Barks and the publisher. Introduction copyright (c)2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

We received this from Martin Hickel. He is a fabulous poet and runs this poetry series.

Sunset Poetry by the Bay at Studio 333
333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito, Calif.
Wednesday, July 15 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Wednesday, July 15 Sunset Poetry by the Bay at Studio 333 will host readings by three distinguished poets associated with the Bay Area. Dorianne Laux, Joe
Millar and Ellen Bass.




Dorianne Laux is the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai, and a finalist
for the National Book Critics Circle Award Her other collections include Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award; and Awake (1990), which was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. Among her awards are a Pushcart
Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux has taught at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative
Writing. She now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.

Joseph Millar is an American poet. He was raised in western Pennsylvania and after an adult life spent mostly in the SF Bay Area and the Northwest, now
lives in North Carolina. Millar received an MA degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1970. He has worked as a telephone installation foreman and commercial
fisherman and in 1997 gave up this blue collar life to try his hand at teaching. His writing includes two books of poetry, Overtime (Eastern Washington University
Press 2001), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press 2006), as well as two chapbooks, "Slow Dancer", Cherry
Valley Editions, 1992, and "Nightbound", Idaho Review Press, 2009. He is married to poet Dorianne Laux; they live in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Ellen Bass's fourth book of poems, The Human Line, was published by Copper Canyon Press in June 2007. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the
groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973), has published several previous volumes of poetry, including Mules
of Love (BOA, 2002) which won the Lambda Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly,
Ms., The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Field. She was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of
Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman's Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review's Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the
Chautauqua Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Fellowship from the California Arts Council.

More info poetnews(at)sonic.net or visit www.studio333.info.

Subject: Muldoon on Colbert and at the BPC!

Muldoon's Picnic- A Mixum-Gatherum of Poetry and Music with: Menage a Twang, Emily Moore, Paul Muldoon, and Brenda Shaughnessy -Saturday, June 20th 8pm, Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery (at Houston) -$15

Watch Muldoon on Colbert here:

http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://www.hulu.com/watch/78622/the-colbert-report-thu-jun-18-200

Catch him at the BPC tomorrow night!

Menage a Twang is a Brooklyn-based indie outfit that blends lovely three part harmonies with razor sharp wit, acoustic guitars with an anti depressant pill bottle shaker, and camp irony with a genuine love for all things country music. Whether Emily Moore, Jessica Del Vecchio, and Rachel Levy are lamenting a soul-sucking day job, cursing their tiny shared studio apartment, celebrating a successful one night stand, or calling friends out on their secret conservative side, the Menage's songs will move you. Or make you want to move out of the metropolitan area.

Whether Emily Moore, Jessica Del Vecchio, and Rachel Levy are lamenting a soul-sucking day job, cursing their tiny shared studio apartment, celebrating a successful one night stand, or calling friends out on their secret conservative side, the Menage's songs will move you. Or make you want to move out of the metropolitan area.

Emily Moore teaches English at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Her writing has appeared in The Yale Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily and Newsweek. She received a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 2004.

Paul Muldoon is the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker and has several collections of poetry. He won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his Moy Sand and Gravel (2002) Collection. His tenth collection, Horse Latitudes appeared in the fall of 2006.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review.

Wheelchair accessible... brilliant, cool and cozy as ever on the inside...
Write a poem now thank you.
I want to thank Gary Glazner for this post.

Hello Friends,

Many of you may have already been informed of this, but in case you have not, David Bromige passed away on June 3rd. His wife Cecelia would like you to read the link below and comment if you'd like

http://bromige.wordpress.com

there is also more information at the poetry foundation web site about his life: (see below)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org:80/harriet/2009/06/in-memoriam-david-bromige/

We mourn his passing. He was a very kind man and wonderful poet.

Connie Post
Livermore Poet Laureate
connie@poetrypost.com
www.poetrypost.com

Harold Norse, who was once called by William Carlos Williams "the best poet of his generation," has passed away at age 92.
His last words were:"The End is the Beginning." The Beat Museum, located at 504 Broadway (at Columbus) in San Francisco, will be hosting a memorial for him on Sunday, July 12th, TBA.

For more information, please go to: http://www.kerouac.com. (I didn't saw the event listed on the web page as of Thursday morning.)

Email at: info<a>kerouac.com or call 1-800-Ker-ouac (1-800-537-6822) or 1-831-372-4911.

Links:

Norse Page at the Beat Museum: http://www.beatmuseum.org/norse/haroldnorse.html.

Memorial Website: http://haroldnorse.com/

Details of Harold's Last Hours: http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=402&Itemid=39

Beat Museum:http://www.kerouac.com

Beat Museum on Wheels:http://www.thebeatmuseumonwheels.com

posted by Carl Macki