The July 16th reading will be a treat. It will be a night above/ground at the Carleton Tavern (upstairs).
Three from among my favorite people and poets will be reading: Marilyn Irwin, Cameron Anstee (a Hot Ottawa Voice for 2010) and Marcus McCann (of Soft Where). If you can make it, it’d be worthwhile.
Tune in to Click Here Wednesday July 14 at 5 pm, on CHUO-FM89 (www.chuo.fm), for an hour-long interview and reading with poets Cameron Anstee and Marilyn Irwin.

It’s all open mic tonight at Tree with a bonus speaker Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California, David Starkey, to kick off the July 13th evening at 8 o’clock.
The main reading begins each time with a reading in tribute to a local or world poet who has passed on. There’s one or two open mics and the feature.
Before each Tree, at 6:45 is a free drop in workshop. This week and on the 27th is Guy Simser.
Features:
July 27: Olive Senior
Aug. 10: Hot Ottawa Voices — Cameron Anstee, Christine McNair, and Gillian Wallace
Aug. 24: Dean Steadman, Sue Bowness and Janice Tokar
Sept. 14: Karen Connelly (& Origami Crane Awards)
Sept. 28: Ken Babstock and David O’Meara
August and September workshops facilitated by Claudia Radmore
Oct 12: Katia Grubisic
Oct. 26: Joshua Auerbach and Betsy Struthers
Nov. 9: David McFadden
Nov. 23: Dave Margoshes and Colin Morton
Oct. and Nov workshops facilitated by Ronnie R. Brown
Dec. 14: All Open-Mic
Workshop facilitated by me

[via Marrty]

Deadline October 1, 2010.
For the follow-up to My Diva, the Lambda-nominated essay anthology.
Looking for poems (1-2 pages in length) that explore the relationship between strong female icons and gay men.
Looking for all kinds of DIVAS: singers, actresses, comics, chefs, politicians, writers, visual artists, athletes, scientists, fashion models … Broadway, Opera, Country, fictional, religious, and mythic figures … Already have many standards but would love to see women like Bea Arthur, Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Jackie O., Dolly Parton, even characters like Miss Piggy. But open to ideas. Please send poem and a 2-3 sentence bio by October 1, 2010 to Michael Montlack at mikemont17 [at] hotmail.com with “DIVA POETRY ANTHOLOGY” in subject line.

The events and lineup for the Dodge Poetry Festival is being announced. So far: Kathleen Graber, Penny Harter, Rachel Hadas, Santee Frazier, Rita Dove, Kwame Dawes Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, Michael Cirelli, Mark Strand and Rigoberto González.
Oct. 7-10th they’re back!
For those keeping track, it was announced to be a victim of its own popularity and was to either end, or regroup and come back much smaller. Run by a charitable foundation with the byline of “a society more humane: a world more livable”, it aims to connect and educate people, among other things, on the power of the word.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is neither an academic symposium nor a writing conference. Through a wide range of poetry readings, storytelling sessions, and musical performances, participants are invited to spend four days immersed in our most ancient arts.

With 2 dozen poets and some events seating 50 and others up to 2700 people, it’s nothing small scale. The regular sessions they have before have been reinstated much the same. (yay!)

Poets on Poetry sessions in which individual Festival Poets discuss their own relationship to poetry by presenting and discussing poems (by others and by themselves) which are important to them.
Conversations: On the Life of the Poet bring together two to four poets to talk with each other and the audience about their lives and their art.
Other Conversations with panels of Festival Poets have included such topics as “The Mysterious Life Within Translation,” “Poetry and Jazz,” “Poetry and the Dignity of the Ordinary,” and “Going Public with Private Feelings,” among many others.
The Festival offers the public the chance to talk with accomplished poets in Conversations on Craft, which include discussions of work patterns and work habits as well as specific matters of poetic craft.

Now I want to watch the lineup develop, and maybe wrangle a route to a road trip. Who’s in?

A Sea of Alone: Poems for Alfred Hitchcock (Dark Scribe Press, 2010) is edited Christopher Conlon. The anthology is due to release this fall. It will contain poems by two local writers: Deborah-Anne Tunney and Frances Boyle.