A New View of the Creek!

On July 15th, we were happy to welcome Nicole Cooley and Ellen Rachlin to Miller’s Cabin. Someone had moved the picnic tables out of last week’s formation, so we decided to try something new and set up the reading with the audience facing the creek. The night was perfect and the view spectacular. Thank Fate (and the previous picnickers) for that suggestion.


Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and her book of poetry about Hurricane Katrina, Breach, is forthcoming from LSU Press. She began the evening reading poems from the new book about her family, St. Bernard Parish, and the city's response to the hurricane.
(Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, came out with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal.) It seemed especially fitting for her to read the Katrina poems outdoors, by the bubbling creek, which, as Karren Alenier pointed out, has flooded in the past. The audience felt honored to have such a picturesque and powerful preview.

Next, Ellen Rachlin read. She is the author of Until Crazy Catches Me (Antrim House Books, 2008), and two chapbooks, Waiting for Here (Finishing Line Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Captive to Residue (Flarestack Publishing, 2009). Ellen’s poems remind me of Anglo-Saxon riddles, with answers like smoke, wind, an egg, time. In her stanzas, for instance, water may have a lair and lemons may be sweet. Wonderful to hear her selections out loud – delicate, puzzling, intriguing.

Our last Miller Cabin reading of the year is coming up next week, July 22, 2008: Sauci Churchill and Therese Halscheid will feature. Please join us at 7:30 in Picnic Area #6 for the grand finale!

Special thanks to Michael Hauptschein for the many times he has brought his unicorn banners to the park to help make the backyard of the Miller Cabin festive!

Sheila Black and Charles E. Wright

July 8th brought about another attentive and somewhat boisterous audience in Rock Creek Park by Miller’s Cabin. We’ve been very fortunate with the weather this year, with just our June 10th reading held inside due to a whopper of a thunderstorm. In any case, it was an impressive turnout of poetry lovers.

We were very happy to have Sheila Black as one of our featured readers, visiting all the way from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Sheila is author of House of Bone (CustomWords Press, 2007) and the chapbook How to be a Maquiladora (Main Street Rag, 2006). Her second full-length collection, Love/Iraq, is forthcoming in 2008. The immediacy and imagination in her poems, such as “Barcelona” and “What You Mourn” held the audience captive and left us all wanting more!


Our second featured reader of the evening was Charles E. Wright. His musings on schwa and the infield fly rule kept us all attentive and entertained. In introducing him, I stole (with permission, of course) a favorite short poem of his:





Salad Days

These ribbons
of carrots

were medallions
in my youth.

And I learned something new, talking with Charles. Wallace Stevens’ wife was the model for the Mercury dime! There's got to be a poem in that somewhere!

What a great evening!

A Crowd Gathers for John O’Dell and Katy Richey

John O’Dell treated us to a fine selection of his poetry, including this one, from a visit he took to Alaska. (Click on “Archibald MacLeish” in the epigraph to learn more about MacLeish in DC)

Asking More
“Do you ask more? Do you ask to travel forever?”
Archibald MacLeish in Tourist Death

Not long before he died, my father
went north, bored his Studebaker
through a wide redwood, puzzled over
The Trees of Mystery, posed my mother
before totems, trading posts, then beside
a Mounty, the milky waters of Lake Louise.

Now, I approach the sheer wall of years
he stood upon when he made that trip.
I, too, find myself following a needle’s
northern urge, looking at Raven’s wooden
preening, hearing his hoarse morning cries,
the afternoon thunder of calving ice.

Salmon shove against a creek’s unyielding
flow, fight for and win the death that birth
ordains, and in their spawning, outruns.
I stand halfway across a Ketchikan bridge
refusing the river’s infallible instruction.
In steady drizzle, in silence, I ask for more.

Next, Katy Richey’s poems graced the evening.Searching and playful, mysterious and direct--from “charlotte,” observations on the baby spiders in Charlotte’s Web, to a set of poems on the body: breasts, penis envy, blood pressure, Katy overcame a finicky sound system to deliver her poems with style. Please visit more of Katy’s poems in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

The open mic brought our evening to a satisfying close, as dusk set in and moved to dark and we headed up the hill to the reception site. A number of our readers have a web presence, and this week I’ll offer a link to Elliot Perlin’s book, Like the Trailings of a Comet on an Endless Journey.


There were over thirty in the audience on Tuesday, a perfect July evening for poetry at Miller Cabin.


Please join us next week for Sheila Black and Charles E. Wright:
Tuesday, July 8 at 7:30.

John Murillo and Suzanne Zweizig at Miller Cabin

On June 24 our series continued, featuring John Murillo and Suzanne Zweizig. John’s poems captured us easily with their music and images. Poems like “The Corner” and “Trouble Man” pulled us into a tough world of song as well as sorrow.

Suzanne’s poems took us on a trip to Europe and to Israel. We found her work to be full of memorable surprises: “the crowd spills in little archipelagos,” “a woman with heightened eyebrows reapplies her champagne in moderate gulps,” “bones surf the ground,” “the world hung like a piano out the window to spin.”

It was a refreshing and energizing evening at the cabin! Please join us July 1 at 7:30 to welcome poets John O’Dell and Katy Richey. Bring your friends! Come early to sign up for the open mic.

An AU Evening at Miller Cabin!

Our series moved outdoors again on June 17th with perfect weather-- clear skies, mid 80's, low humidity, and poetry that lived up to whatever expectations such weather might bring.

The reading, with Kyle Dargan (author of The Listening and Bouquet of Hungers) and David Keplinger (author of, most recently, The Prayers of Others), was an introduction to new poetic leaders in the Washington DC literary community. Both Kyle and David teach poetry at American University and are filling the void left by world class poet-professors Myra Sklarew and Henry Taylor. Kyle's poetry presented at the Cabin left an overall impression of political connectedness tempered by an emotional tenderness and musical sensibility. David's reading is best characterized by this line from his poem "Life on Earth," "You are breathing in what something beautiful and ancient has breathed out." A wonderful storyteller as well as reader, David expands the universe of possibilities and that's what he called on the attentive audience at Miller's Cabin to do!

Diane Lockward with Young Poets at Miller Cabin

On June 10, our series continued with Diane Lockward reading with the winners of the Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Prize: Will Frazier and Megan Hauptmann. This time the sky was clearly threatening and our reading site was the Sixth Presbyterian Church on 16th St. NW and Kennedy. Diane’s poems captivated us, with their ordinary subject matter and extraordinary images, with their playful and dangerous leaps. Her voice combined with the strong, dynamic voices of Will and Megan to make for a memorable evening of poetry. Add a few mice skittering across the stage and the flashing lightning…What an evening! What talent! Thanks to all who helped make this evening happen, including Perry Epes, who coordinated the Young Poets Prize, and Teri Cross Davis, who judged.

Please follow these links to purchase Diane Lockward’s books: Eve’s Red Dress and What Feeds Us. We’ll be on the lookout for work by Will and Megan in the years to come!

Links to Poets’ Books Here! Miller Cabin 2008 Off to a Fabulous Start

On June 3, the 33rd Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Reading Series opened with a reading featuring Barbara Crooker and Anne Higgins. With determined optimism, I set up the sound system under the trees by the cabin only to be disappointed by raindrops at 7:25. Quickly we moved to the picnic shelter where we were treated to poems by Barbara (with their brilliant ekphrasis) and Anne’s playful, rich images, including a moving and clever tribute to Emily Dickinson. Alas, our reception site was locked when we arrived later that evening, so please consider ordering the poets’ work using the links in this entry. Barbara has two full-length books, Radiance, which won the Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Line Dance, newly out.