December's Featured Poet is R.A. “Ron” Villanueva who holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from Rutgers University and teaches British and American Literature at Edison High School. He is a recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center and was recently awarded a place in Kundiman's inaugural Emerging Asian-American Poets Retreat. He lives in New York City. Here is one of Ron's poems:

On reading Keats at the Lube Express

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
— John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

i write poetry while
three men dissect my car.

hood agape,
they drape a red shirt across the front lip
of the engine cavity—
one headlight lost.

as a matter of protocol
and consequence
liquids are drained
fluids are replaced
bolts are tightened
in orchestral manoeuvres
i cannot hope to understand:

black and brown
and grease
and oil

and i sit on a flourescent yellow curb
in front of an arrow pointing to the highway.

crankshafts and converters are exchanged
in a smoky pas de deux
as they
speak in code
pointing and assessing,
making notes
with a closing of eyes, a shaking of heads.

they play jumprope with my belts.

i cannot see the man in the bay below
but i hear his disembodied voice ricochet
with a metallic ping
off of exhaustpipes and the sharpened tips of variable- speed power tools.

they call him robin;
and i wonder if he has ever sung in the shower
by himself
as he scrapes the smell of gasoline from beneath his fingernails

the men call him beneath my car
to add attention to the underside,
commanding him to nurse my filters
and to tourniquet leakage as

leaves skitter across the asphalt as

i wear a pink shirt
and black cotton trousers.


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MERITAGE PRESS' 2004 HOLIDAY POETRY CONTEST

Dear Filipino/a Poets:
You are invited to submit to a fun poetry contest. No submission fees. E-mail submissions. Details below:

Fourth Annual Holiday Poetry Contest
Sponsors: Meritage Press and the NPA (New Poets Army)
Judge: Sarah Gambito
Deadline: December 31, 2004

ABOUT THE JUDGE:
Sarah Gambito holds degrees from The University of Virginia (B.A.) and Brown University (M.F.A.). Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She lives in New York City. Her long-awaited, award-winning first poetry MATADORA will be released soon by Alice James Books. She is also the co-founder of the Asian American poetry organization, KUNDIMAN (www.kundiman.org).

ABOUT THE CONTEST:
All poets are encouraged to submit by e-mailing 1 or 2 poems to MeritagePress@aol.com. (Send no more than 2 poems). Please present poems within the body of the email as we do not open attachments.) Please include your full name along with your e-mail address. However, the poems will be sent without your names to judge Sarah Gambito, thereby allowing the poems to be read on their own merit. All poets are welcome to submit -- it doesn't matter whether you're established or emerging as the work is read on its own merit.

There are no limitations to poetry styles or content. All types of poems are welcome. We are now taking submissions up to the deadline of December 31, 2004.

Only previously unpublished poems are eligible (you may, however, submit poems that you have featured on your own web sites or or blogs, or that have been published in limited edition chapbooks of no more than 250 copies).

Meritage Press has asked Sarah Gambito to choose one winner. However, Sarah may choose other finalist-winners, depending on the quality of the submissions. The winner(s) will have their poems published in the February 2005 edition of "Babaylan Speaks" at http://meritagepress.com/babaylanspeaks/.

The FIRST PLACE winner also will receive copies of

MATADORA by Sarah Gambito (Alice James Books); for information about the book, go to http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/matadora.html

MENAGE A TROIS WITH THE 21ST CENTURY , by Eileen Tabios (xPress(ed); for information about the book, go to http://www.oovrag.com/~oov/books/2004xpress.shtml ;

the time at the end of this writing by Paolo Javier; for information about the book, go to http://www.sendecki.com/ahadada/store/product_info.php?products_id=28 ; and

Museum of Absences by Luis H. Francia (Meritage Press; for information about the book, go to http://meritagepress.com/museum.htm ).

Other finalist-winners besides the First Place winner, if any, will receive two of the above-listed books (the choice of books are up to Meritage Press).


**************************

VENANCIO IGARTA, CARLOS VILLA AND EILEEN TABIOS REPRESENTS FILIPINOS IN A NEW GROUNDBREAKING EXHIBITION

The Poetry Center
presents

WHAT: POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004
WHEN: Exhibit opening: Saturday December 11, 2004 (noon to 4:30 pm)
Closing date: Saturday April 16, 2005
Galleries open to the public Wed.-Sat., noon to 4:30 pm
WHERE: @ California Historical Society, 678 Mission St. (4 doors east of 3rd St.,
downtown San Francisco, near Montgomery BART), 415-357-1848
CONTACT: The Poetry Center, telephone: 415-338-2227, email: poetry@sfsu.edu

The exhibit POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004 will open to the public on Saturday December 11, 2004, and will occupy the galleries at California Historical Society in downtown San Francisco's museum district for 17 weeks, until April 16, 2005. More than 100 original works --many never publicly exhibited-- by over 80 individuals will be on display. This first-of-its-kind exhibit represents a collaboration between the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, currently observing its 50th anniversary with poetry programs throughout the city, and the California Historical Society. The exhibit offers a multi-faceted window onto the rich interactions that have taken place over the past half-century, centered around San Francisco's celebrated poetry community.

The exhibit, curated by Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison, is focused on:

~ art made by poets
~ poet-artist collaborations
~ works by artists in poets' circles

The exhibit will prominently feature San Francisco poet and visual artist Norma Cole's site-specific installation Collective Memory, a multimedia work situated in the foyer of the gallery, made in collaboration with the Poetry Center and sponsored by the Creative Work Fund. Cole's activities will involve the composition of a work of poetry within the space of the gallery, with subsequent publication as a fine-print artist's edition by Granary Books of New York City.

A broad spectrum of individual artworks, beginning in the 1950s with original pieces by prominent poet-artists close to the Poetry Center from its early days, will lead up to a diverse array of contemporary artworks that carry on the Bay Area's interactive poet-artist traditions.

Exceptional earlier pieces exhibited in the show include:

* Kenneth Rexroth's distinctive, delicate work with pastels
* rarely shown collaborations and individual works by Robert Duncan and Jess
* Kenneth Patchen's fantastical painted beasts
* Allen Ginsberg's West Coast photos from 1955 during the time of his poem Howl to 1984
* Saburo Hasegawa's wildly exuberant calligraphic work based on Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching
* an original private press work by William Everson (Brother Antoninus), who undertook the printer's trade while in a World War II Conscientious Objector camp in Waldport, Oregon
* paintings by poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima
* Mary Oppen's torn-paper collage depicting her husband, poet George Oppen
* calligraphic works by friends and Reed College alumni Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder, students of legendary calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds
* surreal balladeer Helen Adam's otherworldly collage-work
* David Meltzer's collages mining the iconography of Jewish Kabbalah
* Fran Herndon's collages invoking pop-culture icons Willie Mays and Marilyn Monroe
* rare visual works by poets Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, Madeline Gleason, and Barbara Guest
* major early paintings by Black Mountain College alumni Tom Field and Paul Alexander, regarded as signal works of the time
* the generation of assemblage artists that coalesced in the Bay Area during the 1950s will be represented with works by Wallace Berman, Jess, Bruce Conner, and George Herms

Among new pieces in the exhibit, highlights include recent works by Bay Area painters Carlos Villa, Amy Trachtenberg, Gustavo Ramos Rivera, Arnold J Kemp, and Oliver Jackson. The exhibit will not focus intensively on books, though several outstanding examples of area book-arts will appear on display. Individual photo-portraits and historical shots by area photographers will accent the painted, drawn, handprinted, and constructed artworks.

"In many ways, this exhibit is a tribute to the poet-artist galleries that had short but significant lifespans in San Francisco of the 1950s and '60s: King Ubu Gallery, the Six Gallery, Batman Gallery, Borregard's Museum, Buzz Gallery, and the North Beach coffeehouses and bars that did double duty as art-spaces. The San Francisco of this period served as a geographic confluence of radically realized individual and collective visions. Poets and artists together as friends, lovers, rivals, and audience to one another's practice, creatively imagined a city perched on the country's far coast, and worked together to bring that city into being."
--Steve Dickison, curator of the exhibit

POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004 is dedicated to extraordinary San Francisco artist Jess (1923-2004), companion of the late poet Robert Duncan, pioneer of California assemblage art, and great friend to the poets, and to San Francisco literary editor Donald M. Allen (1912-2004), whose 1960 anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 , and subsequent work as editor and publisher, was instrumental in opening up audiences for an innovative counter-tradition of American poets, many of whom have works on display in the exhibit.

Gallery admission for POETRY and its ARTS is $3 for adults. Students with ID, $1.00. High school students, with identification, can be admitted free of charge, and docent tours designed for high-school age audiences can be arranged by contacting the Poetry Center, 415-338-2227, e-mail: poetry@sfsu.edu. Galleries at California Historical Society, 678 Mission Street (4 doors east of 3d St.) are open to the public Wednesday thru Saturday, noon to 4:30 pm.

POETRY and its ARTS: Bay Area interactions 1954-2004
ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBIT

Juvenal Acosta
Helen Adam
Etel Adnan
Paul Alexander
Gordon Baldwin
Dodie Bellamy
Franco Beltrametti
Bill Berkson
Wallace Berman
Ronald Bladen
Robin Blaser
Jack Boyce
Joe Brainard
Frances Butler
Rene Castro
John Cage
Enrique Chagoya
Chuong Huang Chung
Tom Clark
Norma Cole
Bruce Conner
Kate Delos
Diane di Prima
Robert Duncan
Ernie Edwards
Amy Evans McClure
William Everson
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Tom Field
Russell Fitzgerald
Christa Fleischmann
Jack D. Forbes
Kathleen Fraser
Nemi Frost
Juan R. Fuentes
Allen Ginsberg
Madeline Gleason
Guillermo Gomez-Peña
Robert Grenier
Barbara Guest
Donald Guravich
Philip Guston
Lou Harrison
Carla Harryman
Saburo Hasegawa
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Mary Ann Hayden
Lyn Hejinian
George Herms
Fran Herndon
Jack Hirschman
Tanya Hollis
Leo Holub
V. C. Igarta
Deborah Iyall
Oliver Jackson
Colter Jacobsen
Harry Jacobus
Jess
Alastair Johnston
Lawrence Jordan
Larry Keenan
Arnold J Kemp
Kevin Killian
R. B. Kitaj
Joanne Kyger
Marianne Kolb
Robert LaVigne
David Levi-Strauss
Clarence Major
Michael McClure
William MacNeil
David Meltzer
Jack Micheline
Michael Myers
Arthur Okamura
Mary Oppen
Kenneth Patchen
Raymond Pettibon
John Kelley Reed
Harry Redl
Kenneth Rexroth
Felicia Rice
Stan Rice
Gustavo Ramos Rivera
Tasha Robbins
Rena Rosenwasser
Tina Rotenberg
Floyd Salas
Leslie Scalapino
George Schneeman
C. R. Snyder
Gary Snyder
Jack Spicer
Eileen Tabios
Glenn Todd
Amy Trachtenberg
Truong Tran
Carlos Villa
Lew Welch
Philip Whalen
Jonathan Williams
Will Yakulic

# # #

=================
Steve Dickison, Director
The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue ~ San Francisco CA 94132
http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry