David Alpaugh and Kathleen Lynch
Monday, Oct. 22 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Tim Kahl
David Alpaugh‘s latest chapbook “Crazy Dave Talks With the Poets” comes with an “EPA WARNING”: This is a self-published book! Only the author maintains that the poetry herein is worth reading. Still, Alpaugh’s poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies that include Able Muse, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Formalist, Light, Modern Drama, Poetry, Rattle, Scene4, Thema, Wisconsin Review, Zyzzyva and the Dana Gioia edited California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present. His first book, Counterpoint, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and he has been a finalist for Poet Laureate of California. A lifetime member of the California Writers Club and long-time Publications Director for the Ina Coolbrith Circle, David has hosted more than 150 monthly poetry readings at Bay Area venues. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley where he was a Woodrow Wilson and Ford Foundation Fellow and has taught at Rutgers, USF, and the UC Berkeley Extension.
Kathleen Lynch‘s collection Hinge (2006) won the Black Zinnias Press National Poetry Book Competition (California Institute of Arts and Letters). Her chapbooks include How to Build an Owl (Select Poet Series Award, Small Poetry Press, 1995), No Spring Chicken (White Eagle Coffee Store Press Award, 2001), Alterations of Rising (Small Poetry Press Select Poet Series, 2001) and Kathleen Lynch – Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2002).
Her work (fiction and poetry) appears in several anthologies, including The Next River Over— A Collection of Irish American Writing (New Rivers Press), Times Ten: An Anthology of Northern California Poets (Small Poetry Press), Who are the Rich and Where Do They Live? (DePaul University Press), In a Fine Frenzy— Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press), Birds in Hand— Fiction and Poetry about Birds (Farrar Straus & Giroux) and The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University Press of Notre Dame). Her poems appear in many literary journals, including Poetry, Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Chariton Review, Runes, The Laurel Review, Poetry Northwest, The Midwest Quarterly, Two Rivers Review, Slipstream, Quarterly West, and The Midwest Review. She received the Spoon River Poetry Review Editor’s Choice Award, the Salt Hill Poetry Award, Two Rivers Review Prize, Peregrine and Sow’s Ear prizes, and a Ucross Foundation Residency Fellowship.
She worked as Coordinator of Writers in Performance, and Writers’ Workshops for San Jose Center for Poetry and Fiction, served as board member for the San Jose Center for Literature and Arts, taught through Poets in the schools (all grade levels), mentors individual poets, and conducts Teachers’ In-Service training programs for elementary and high school teachers. Lynch also publishes fiction, essays, reviews, and does free-lance editing. She lives in California.
Human Terms
The albino calf stands
in the pasture, shining.
Autumn. Last spring’s
birds are back.
They must be exhausted.
Isn’t this the luck
of life—to see the one
thing, then the other?
It’s all right to fall in love
with the idea of that gleaming
freak with its pink-
rimmed eyes, its near
blindness. So young. Nearly
spirit I might say. Other-
worldly. But don’t let me
turn a white calf into myth.
The creature shoulders
into the dappled herd.
Something nameless pushes
the strange one forward,
pulls the birds
back to us, to nothing
to do with us. We can’t help
wanting to be the story.
I stole figs today
while watching cows.
They loosened
into my hand easily
and opened, as if they had
been waiting for me.
