Joan Logghe and Art Goodtimes Poetry Reading
Presented by Teatro Paraguas • Live on Zoom
Sunday, June 13 • 5 p.m.
Free, donations gratefully accepted
Link to register can be found at TeatroParaguasNMm.org.
Joan Logghe works at Poetry in Community, off the academic grid, in La Puebla, New Mexico. She and Michael built their own solar house, raised three children, and have four grandchildren. Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Grants, A Mabel Dodge Luhan Internship, and a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant. She taught poetry in Bratislava; Vienna; and Zagreb, Croatia in 2004. Joan served as Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2012. She has authored or edited a dozen books including The Singing Bowl, from UNM press and Unpunctuated Awe: Santa Fe Poems, Tres Chicas Books. For more information about Joan, visit JoanLogghe.com.
Art Goodtimes was poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Mountain Gazette before getting elected five terms as a Green County Commissioner in Southwestern Colorado. Art hosts the Union of Mountain Poets on Facebook, co-edits the online anthology SageGreenJournal.org and is national poetry editor for Fungi magazine. He is co-director of Talking Gourds, a Telluride Institute poetry program. He served as Colorado’s Western Slope Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2013, and in 2020 was awarded the Chamberlain Award for lifetime achievement in Colorado poetry at the Mountain Words Literary Festival in Crested Butte. His latest book is Dancing on Edge (Lithic Press, Fruita, 2019).
This is the first time Joan and Art have read together since the first Talking Gourds Poetry Festival in Telluride in 1989.
Contact:
Argos MacCallum
argos@teatroparaguas.org
505.577.2679
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How to Improvise Rain
by Joan Logghe
Take a shower and sing about rain.
Know that rain and grace are the same
Word in some Middle Eastern languages.
Say grace, then water the lawn
With a Rain Bird Sprinkler. Play Coltrane,
The Grateful Dead, or Ella Fitzgerald to your lawn.
Talk to the grass. Say, “La, la, la.”
Pour dishwater on rosebushes.
Deconstruct the word drought.
Ought. Draft beer. Drama. Ouch.
Examine the sky for sky-looms, where rain
In the distance never hits the ground.
Make weather predictions.
Devise a theory about rain. Make life grainy
Through slow, long exposures.
Develop black-and-white
Film from a storm. Chant in Sanskrit
About the River Ganges.
Hand churn rain-flavored ice cream.
Wear ozone perfume. Play a kettledrum
Softly. Do not waste tears.
But cry. Go to sad movies. Find a man
Who cries. Marry for moisture not money.
Make love on a roof. Have wet children.
Go to the Rainbow Dance at Santa Clara and love
Children holding painted rainbows in their hands.
Watch the backdrop of clouds darken, wince at lightning.
But a pass to the local pool. Hang Laundry.
Wash a car as sacrifice. Put on white slacks and walk
Along Paseo de Peralta. Improvise grace.
Save bathwater and send it to the apple.
Learn a song in the Tewa language.
Dance till you sweat to “The River of Babylon.”
Petition Saint Jude.
Read these words outside.
Name your son Noah.