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In-Store Poetry Reading: Bill Siverly and Penelope Scambly Schott
January 12, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
FreeAnnie Bloom’s welcomes local poets Bill Siverly and Penelope Scambly Schott for readings from their latest collections.
About Starry Night:
“Employing a mirrored parallelism for both individual poems and this entire collection, Bill Siverly takes us on a journey that encompasses Germany, his childhood in Idaho, the pandemic, and the drought. Although Starry Night celebrates the balm of the natural world and the joys of a passionate marriage, the gravitas of the tone here is clear: These poems implicate us fully in the destruction we’ve wrought on our world. Siverly’s lyric voice demands we acknowledge ‘how in one lifetime we’ve greased the skids / of our human demise.'” -Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of One Small Sun
Bill Siverly was born and grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and he has lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1972. He holds a Master of Arts degree from San Francisco State University. He taught Native American and world literatures, composition, and creative writing at Portland Community College for twenty-five years. Bill has published six books of poems: Parzival (1981), Phoenix Fire (1987), The Turn (2000), Clearwater Way (2009), Steptoe Butte (2013), and Nightfall (2018). From 2002 to 2022 he was co-editor with Michael McDowell of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which featured poetry of the Pacific Northwest and appeared twice yearly on the equinoxes. With his partner Jutta Donath, he looks forward to more adventures in Germany, and the thrill of new memories and new poems.
About Waving Fly Swatters at Angels:
The poems of Penelope Scambly Schott’s new collection embrace silliness, sensuality, and sublimity-an entire world in their wry lines. “Penelope Scambly Schott’s poems are wondrous, funny, tragic, tender toward dogs, tenderly pitying of men, ensnared by motherhood, and above all (or below all) humane. Let yourself be carried by the wisdom of her childlike beginner’s mind and her sensual woman’s body, through a lifetime of pointed truths in which the ‘stink of despair’ is also a ‘jewel upon/ our open palm.'”- Alicia Ostriker, author The Volcano and After and The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog
Penelope Scambly Schott has become an enthusiastic and devoted Oregonian. She received four arts grants in New Jersey before moving to Oregon where she joined a hiking group and received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She now lives in the small wheat-growing town of Dufur (pop: 635) where for several years she has led an annual poetry workshop. She and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon in Portland. Recent books include On Dufur Hill (2020) and Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman (2021), co-written with her equally enthusiastic and devoted dog.