The good people at Kyoto Journal have sent me the following information about a poetry event at Kyoto Nama Chocolate this Saturday (April 9th). Read on!
Poetry Reading @ Kyoto Nama Chocolate Organic Teahouse, Okazaki
Saturday April 9th, 2011, from 6:30pm
with Preston Keido Houser, shakuhachi
A Kyoto Journal Event
John Brandi, poet, painter, essayist, and haijin, lives with René Gregorio in the American Southwest. As a poet, he owes much to America’s Beat tradition, and to his travels with the Japanese poet-wanderer, Nanao Sakaki. Journeys with Renée in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, India and Nepal have informed much of his more recent writing. In 2005 he co-edited The Unswept Path: Contemporary American Haiku. Recent books include Facing High Water and In What Disappears. His newest, Seeding the Cosmos, presents haiku selections from 30 years devoted to the craft. Full bio here.
Renée Gregorio’s poetry collections include The Skins of Possible Lives, The Storm That Tames Us, Water Shed, and Drenched, plus many chapbooks, most recently Road to the Cloud’s House: A Chiapas Journal (with John Brandi). She holds a third-degree black belt rank in aikido, and is currently at work on a collection of tanka written over the course of three years entitled Snow Falling on Snow. Renée is a co-founder of the publishing collective, Tres Chicas Books (www.treschicasbooks.com). She’s a certified master somatic coach who loves combining principles of aikido, poetry and somatics in individual and group work with writers. Full bio here.
“Traveling side by side, recording particulars of the journey, we return home to attend to the details. One of us writes a poem based on memory, quick-flash imagery, journal jottings, then turns it over to the other, who responds with a poem, and so on: a spontaneous ball-toss, where free-associative thoughts emerge in back and forth poetic dialogue.”
As the originally planned venue for this event is not yet available we have moved the event to Sherry and Hirofumi’s Kyoto Nama-Chocolate Organic Teahouse, just one block away.
Contacts: Ken Rodgers, 075 712-7129, John Einarsen, 075 761 1433
Ken adds, “Admission by optional donation with some free refreshments (we have the use of the place but it’s after-hours for the teahouse so no sets available).”
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