Reading Local: Portland

Today’s Featured Book Event:

One Square Inch of Silence (Powells City of Books, @7:30pm): Emmy Award-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton pens a beautifully written call to arms against the agents of manmade noise in One Square Inch of Silence (Free Press), an eloquent defense of natural quiet that comes packaged with the author’s astounding recordings of nature.

Other Book Event’s Today:

Sage Cohen and Tom Maddox Reading (Barnes and Noble Lloyd Center, @7:00pm): An ongoing poetry reading series curated by Sage Cohen, author of the new book Writing the Life Poetic.

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Check out Zachary Schomburg’s (who by the way will be reading with Matthew Dickman tonight) blog The Lovely Arc for 5 new announcements from Octopus Books concerning: 1) Eric Baus’s Tuned Droves, 2) Shane McCrae’s One Neither One, 3) Open Reading in April for full-length manuscripts, 4) Subscriptions for 2009-2010, and 5) T-Shirts.

Schomburg’s chapbook, I Am A Small Boy, was also just published by Factory Hollow Press and is now available for purchase.

The long running poetry only journal, Poetry Northwest, will hold a release party for the launch of their Winter ‘08/Spring ‘09 issue next Thursday at The Blue Monk.

Here is the full release:

You like poetry
Your friends like beer
You don’t need to choose between them.

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Reading Local was lucky enough to sit down with the Modern American himself, Rodney Koeneke.  Rodney is a master with words, it comes through in his poems, and I believe it comes through in this video as well.  He invites you in with an eager magnetic energy, allowing you to feel as though you are part of the show right along with him.  Maybe a better way to describe it would be to ask you if you personally know of anyone, who when you’re around them makes you feel the need to put every node in your gray matter to work?  Rodney is an incredibly intelligent individual, and instantly makes you feel somehow smarter just for spending a few moments with him.  Not in a pretentious, esoteric, or aloof way.  But in a warm, ingratiating, and reciprocal way.

A brief note one the video, there is a part towards the end where a guy had to open up a loading dock door behind us and you see the camera dip.  I am not a fan of editing out things, as everything on that video is what actually happened.  Editing out things such as that, seems to remove some of the spontaneity and creativity of the moment.  I hope you gain as much in watching it, as I did in participating in it.