Distinguished Writer Series  Presented by The City of Tacoma and Puget Sound Poetry Connection

Puget Sound Poetry Connection

The goal of our readings is to bring poets of import to Tacoma to

help local poets learn and set goals for their own works.

We also provide a showcase for local poets to share their new work.  All venues are free, physically accessible, and open to the public.   Want more information about "What's Happening" in the poetry realm:

email pspc@pugetsoundpoetryconnection.org and ask to be put on the "Everything" list.

The City of Tacoma and Puget Sound Poetry

Presents the

Distinguished Writer Series

May 9th  at 7 p.m.

at Kings Bookstore (218 St. Helens)

Featured Reader

JOSIE TURNER

Josie Turner

JOSIE EMMONS TURNER was the 2011-2013 Tacoma Poet Laureate.  She has been published in a number of journals and teaches English at Clover Park High School in Lakewood.  Her most recent project, funded by the Tacoma Arts Commission, was editing the chapbook "Sarasvati Takes Pegasus at her Mount" a collection of regional women poets in response to the Tacoma Community College's Grfeek and Roman Tythology Exhi it, spring 2013.  Turner hods a MFA in Creative Writing from PLU's Rainier Writing Workshop and is a resident of Tacoma.

Gilmary

Back in the day when telephones actually rang, we tethered ourselves

with wine or coffee, chatting not 10, 20 minutes but hours.  Long distance

lines carried call, response, contrapuntal inventions, woven friendship

and sisterhood, sometimes dissonant, yet harmonic, our composition

conversation, had no resolution, like the music of summer birds.

Later, when cell phones jived, rocked, wiggled, pinged, winked

your name - or  mine -  we'd pause from golf or Little League games, dusting,

dressing, cooking, sometimes the Holiday game - to chirp and chortle until

batteries died mid-thought.  In music, when the composer is not

quite finished, she takes you back to the Coda, often with a preceding

fermata, repeating familiar theme.  How - my graceful friend - I wish we

were our mothers, reaching a roaring, crashing, complaining, old age crescendo

and...well...if life were a composition, a wish, could you just be Schirmer's -

the practice books - and we - a four-hands duet...go back to the Coda, again?