After August Ends

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Splabman

POPO, the August POetry POstcard Festval was designed in part to give participants a sense of how to compose poetry spontaneously and to create community. For those who do want to go further in their knowledge and practice of spontaneous composition, there are still 6 slots in a six week Sunday night workshop called Poetics as Cosmology. The course begins on Sunday, October 4 (4-6pm PDT) and is $125 + a paypal fee of $3. See: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/splabman for registration and https://paulenelson.com/2020/08/23/poetics-as-cosmology/ for workshop details.

SPLAB Founder Paul E Nelson has studied this stance-toward-poem-making for nearly 30 years and hopes you can begin to experience the joy of spontaneous composition and begin to see the parallels between creating a poem and building a soul.

Posted in Blog | Tagged | Leave a comment

Easy Speak Open Mic and Theresa Whitehill

Posted on August 8, 2020 by Splabman

SPLAB is honored to partner with Easy Speak Seattle to present a night of open mic poetry and featured reader Theresa Whitehill, from Ukiah, CA on Monday, August 24 at 7:30 via Zoom. This event is supported by Poets & Writers.

Zoom invitation will be sent by the Easy Speak Newsletter or is available via Paul E Nelson.  (If you haven’t already, please sign up for the Easy Speak newsletter).

Open mike participants may perform a single poem, song, or work of prose.

We shall have musical contributions as well.

Theresa Whitehill Bio:

Theresa Whitehill photo by Sarah McKinley

A California poet, letterpress printer, and graphic designer, Theresa Whitehill served as Poet Laureate for the northern California city of Ukiah from 2009 through 2011 and has been involved her entire career in the production of poetry readings and literary events. Her interrelated focus on literary and graphic arts came out of her study of book arts at Mills College in the early 1980s. Since 1984 she has lived in Mendocino County, where she is well-known to local poetry audiences. “Évora a Doce,” her poem about Portuguese soul and food, was published by Alice Waters. She has also served as Poet-in-Residence for Stags’ Leap Winery in the Napa Valley.

Whitehill’s collections of poetry include A Grammar of Longing (2009) and A Natural History of Mill Towns (1993), published by Pygmy Forest Press; Saudades, published by Stags’ Leap Winery in 2003; and the anthology, Deep Valley: Poets Laureate of Ukiah 2001–2018, published by Slow Mountain Press in 2017. Her poetry and letterpress broadsides are in numerous fine press collections, including the Getty Center for the Arts, the John Hay Library of Brown University, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and Stanford University’s Special Collections Library. She spends her time between her studios in Ukiah and St. Helena, California, managing her commercial graphic design business, Colored Horse Studios.

Website: http://www.coloredhorse.com/Poetry/
Literary Web Log: http://coloredhorse.wordpress.com/
Poets & Writers Profile: http://www.pw.org/content/theresa_whitehill_1

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Approaches to POPO Collage

Posted on July 29, 2020 by Splabman

Colette Dutton Take Action

Please join us Sunday, August 2 at 4pm PDT, for a Zoom discussion on how three different veteran POPO participants create their unique cards. Join Abhaya Thomas, Colette Dutton and Tim Mateer for an hour session. Zoom I.D. – 206 422 5002.

Paul E Nelson splabman@icloud.com is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2064225002

Meeting ID: 206 422 5002

Colette Dutton

From Colette Dutton: Living in Tacoma, near to the local hub of PoPo, this annual event [POPO] has worked its way under my skin! As an avid reader all of my life, a lover of art, and a photographer by training, these creative forms of expression have become inseparable for the past 5 (or so) years of August Postcard Poetry. I was introduced to Postcard poetry by my friend, Ellen Shaman, and quickly became entranced with it. From drawing and hand coloring my cards, to the more recent explosions of color in mixed media, I hand make my cards nearly exclusively. There have been some likenesses and some differences in the way the cards have been produced over the years, and sometimes the art and the poetry have more connection than others, but they all come from a creative core that is fed by PoPo and the poets who share their wondrous words with me. Enfusiastic Art!Fine Art by Colette Dutton — www.EnfusiasticArt.com

Tim Mateer practices curiosity from his home in Austin Texas which he shares with his first and current wife Sara (26 yrs). He’s been blessed with a career in the performing arts. This is his seventh year to be involved with POPO. He has been making postcards for 35 years. He always wanted to be an astronaut.

Abhaya (rhymes with papaya) Thomas lives with her husband of 40 years on a small farm just outside of Portland. After raising four children she now finds more time to dabble in her lifelong attraction to making art. Seven or so years ago the PoPo Fest became a perfect catalyst for this with the small postcard format a fitting and unintimidating place to begin again. At first the cards were mostly altered vintage ‘real’ postcards but slowly the totally handmade crept in. Now most are some form of mixed media collage with many layers. Watercolor and printmaking also inspire her. Some of her postcard art prompts the poetry… other times there is no connection.

Abhaya Thomas 2020 Card

Colette Dutton Flower-and Ladybug

Two slots are left in the weekly two hour Poetics as Cosmology workshop via Zoom October 3 – Nov 13 at 10am PDT.

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

POPO Seriality

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Splabman

Penelope Moffet

Our Best POPO Practices Zoom webinar last Saturday (July 11 @ 11am) with J.I. Kleinberg and Ina Roy-Faderman was a hit with the POPO faithful and we’re editing it for Youtube. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, longtime POPO participant Penelope Moffet posted this about it on Facebook and granted permission to republish:

I came away from yesterday’s PoPo zoom with some ideas new to me. Here they are, for those who couldn’t make it to the meeting (had you been there, you might well have been struck by different concepts – a lot was said in that hour!):

Start each new poem with the last line of the previous poem, and see where it takes you. Keep doing this, day to day. You will end up in some unexpected places.

Response cards don’t necessarily have to be responses sent to the person whose card triggers your new poem – a card responding to something you received can be sent to someone else, so the conversation continues, in a way, in the collective mind.

When you want to send an art card, you can write the poem first on one side of the card, then let the art you create on the other side relate in some way to the poem. (I’ve always gone in the other direction when/if I make an art card.)

I was also very moved by what Sigrid Saradunn said about how all the postcards she received from PoPo people early this year, when she was going through a hard time, really helped her to get through that time. 💚

Regarding seriality, see: https://paulenelson.com/2015/11/21/gemini-gel-rouen-cathedral-seriality/

And this from Nate Mackey is quite helpful: https://paulenelson.com/2013/04/21/nate-mackey-amerarcana/

There are few art forms as open as seriality in literature. I see it as akin to Free Jazz and at its best, as practiced by a master such as the late Fred Anderson, Free Jazz is a transcendent experience. Seriality will be one thing covered in a six week workshop open to POPO2021 registrants coming this Fall. Details soon.

POPO2020 registration ends July 18, 2020. See: https://popo.submittable.com/submit

Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment