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Peach Blossom Poetry Series: Stella Jeng Guillory

April 20, 2019 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

$10
View Venue Website, 239 NW Everett St, Portland, OR 97209 + Google Map

Chinese gardens in China and Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland are filled with poetic inscriptions: as text, calligraphy, engravings and plaques. Inspired by the culture of literature in Chinese gardens, prolific poets share their work with garden visitors every Saturday in April at 3 p.m.

Included with Lan Su membership or admission; no registration is required.

April 6

A. Molotkov

April 13

Clemens Starck

April 20

Stella Jeng Guillory

April 27

Joni Renee Whitworth

About the Presenters:

Born in Russia, A. Molotkov moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows, and Synonyms for Silence (Acre Books/Cincinnati Review, 2019). Published by Kenyon, Iowa, Antioch, Massachusetts, Atlanta, Bennington and Tampa Reviews, Pif, Volt, 2 River View and many more, Molotkov is winner of various fiction and poetry contests and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His translation of a Chekhov story was included by Knopf in their Everyman Series; his prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan lit. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review.

Clemens Starck was born in Rochester, New York, in 1937. After dropping out of Princeton, he continued his education on the road, riding freight trains and working at a variety of jobs around the country. He has been a ranch hand in eastern Oregon, a newspaper reporter on Wall Street, a door-to-door salesman, and a merchant seaman, among other things.

For over twenty years he worked construction up and down the West Coast, as a union carpenter and carpenter foreman on projects of all kinds, from bridge work in San Francisco and Oregon to custom homes in British Columbia.

As a poet he has received a scholarship from the Breadloaf Writers Conference as well as a grant and year-long residence at the Helene V. Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In 1998 he was the Witter Bynner Fellow and poet-in-residence at Willamette University, where he has taught on several other occasions. In February 2004 he was visiting poet at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

His poems have appeared in numerous magazines over the years, and in anthologies ranging from Walter Lowenfels’ Where Is Vietnam? (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1966) to a compilation of work writing, A Richer Harvest: the Literature of Work in the Pacific Northwest (OSU Press, 1999). A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio and included in Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking / Penguin, 2005).

He has given readings to diverse audiences throughout the West. A collection of his work, Journeyman’s Wages, was published by Story Line Press in 1995. The book received the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and was also the recipient of the 1996 Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Studying Russian on Company Time, an account in verse and prose of his involvement with Russia and the Russian language, appeared in 1999 from Silverfish Review Press and was a finalist for the 1999 Oregon Book Award. (The book was re-issued in a second edition in 2016.) Another full-length collection of poems, China Basin, was published in 2002 by Story Line Press, and was also an Oregon Book Award finalist. Two letterpress chapbooks of his poems have been published by Wood Works in Seattle: Traveling Incognito (2004) and Rembrandt, Chainsaw (2011).

In addition, Starck has recently produced two audio CDs of himself reading his poems against a musical background: Looking for Parts (2008) and Getting It Straight (2013). A new book of poems—Old Dogs, New Tricks—was published in 2016.

Retired from his job as a carpenter doing maintenance and repair work at Oregon State University in Corvallis, he has three grown children and lives on forty-some acres in the foothills of the Coast Range, outside Dallas, Oregon.

Stella Jeng Guillory was born in Fujian Province, China and lived in Taipei, Taiwan. She came to the United States in 1964 to pursuit her graduate studies in organic chemistry at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ and Cornell University in Ithaca NY where she obtained a doctorate degree in organic chemistry. Stella then worked as a researcher in the Biochemistry and Biophysics Department at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.

Fifteen years ago, Stella relocated from Hawaii to the Northwest. She now lives in Vancouver, WA.

Stella translated Dr. Carl Djerassi’s book, Bourbaki Gambit (in 1999); and Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain (in 2002). Both books were published in Taiwan.

Through writingStella explores and gains understanding of her own strength and weakness as an Asian American poet. She finds some of her poems deeply rooted in her psyche of being Chinese. It may well be her strength and some of her weakness, and then again her unique vantage point. She looks forward to the preparation of a full length manuscript for publication.

Stella’s poetry has appeared in Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly; La’ila’i; Sister Stew: Fiction and Poetry by Women; VoiceCatcher, the Winter, 2013 and Summer Issues, 2015; Just Now, 20 New Portland Poets; America the National Catholic Review (2014 & 2015); Verseweavers (2014, 2016, 2017), PoetryMoves and RE: VISION POEMS. My poem, “Chief Joseph’s Flute”, was awarded a second place by the Hawaii Review for the Ian MacMillan Writing Award for Poetry, 2016.

Joni Renee Whitworth is an artist and writer from rural Oregon. She has performed at The Moth, the Segerstrom Center for the Performing Arts in Costa Mesa, California, the MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn in partnership with the Morpheus Youth Project, and the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Marina Abramovic. Her writing explores themes of nature, future, family, and the body, and has appeared in Lambda Literary, Oregon Humanities, Eclectica, Pivot, SWWIM, Smeuse, Superstition Review, xoJane, and The Write Launch. Her poetry chapbook, Your Full Real Name, was published in 2017. Joni is also the creative director of Future Prairie, a collective of marginalized artists.

Venue

Lan Su Chinese Garden
239 NW Everett St
Portland, OR 97209
+ Google Map
Phone
503-228-8131
View Venue Website

Organizer

Lan Su Chinese Garden
Phone:
503-228-8131
Email:
info@lansugarden.org
Website:
View Organizer Website