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Press
Kit WATERSHED Saturday,
September 7, 2002
•
Noon to 5:30 pm
•
Free For Immediate
Release: August 9, 2002 For More
Information Contact: Mark Baldridge:
510-526-9105 Former U.S. Poet
Laureate Robert Hass, Mexico's most
important living poet and environmental
activist Homero Aridjis, poet and
Native American writer Linda Hogan,
novelist and naturalist Brenda
Peterson, poet Michael McClure
with flutist Larry Kassin, poets
Jerome Rothenberg, Patti Trimble
with guitarist Bill Horvitz, and
Chris Olander (presenting Special
River Totem group readings), and
environmental activist Jarid Manos
(Great Plains Restoration Council), head a
list of artists and activists inviting the
community to celebrate nature at the
Seventh Annual Watershed Environmental
Poetry Festival, a free day of poetry,
music, and interactive environmental
events in Berkeley's Civic Center Park,
Saturday, September 7, from noon to 5
p.m. Each year, the
Watershed Festival explores the connection
between the American literary imagination
and our landscape, natural history, and
sense of environmental urgency. This
tradition typically stems from writers
such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir,
Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, Wallace
Stegner, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest
Williams. While honoring this tradition,
Watershed also seeks to examine the
interaction of the entire spectrum of the
American literary imagination. In addition
to main stage readings and performances,
the Festival encourages involvement in
local projects via River Village, an area
for interactive arts, all-ages nature
activities, and literary and grassroots
organizations. Participants include
Shorebird Nature Center (sign up for
Coastal Clean Up), California Poets in the
Schools (Words Take Flight poetry kites),
Ecology Center (simulated restoration of
Strawberry Creek), Poetry Flash (poetry
rubbing panels), East Bay Depot for
Creative Reuse (Critter Mascots masks),
and River of Words (student poetry and
posters). Again, this year's
event will discover connections between
literature and place with a special "Creek
Walk," which begins at Oxford and Center
Streets at 10 am. The public is invited to
join our featured readers for a
three-block walk, tracing the route of
Strawberry Creek as it tunnels beneath the
heart of the city to the site of the
festival. As Berkeley's premier watershed,
Strawberry Creek flows open from the hills
through the UC campus but disappears in a
culvert under most of the city as it makes
its way to the Bay. The walk will focus on
the project of "daylighting" the creek. At
several points throughout the tour,
featured readers will offer their
insights, and restoration advocates will
discuss efforts to daylight different
parts of the creek. At the Watershed
Festival site, the creek, which runs
directly beneath it, will be "miked,"
letting it play gently behind the readers
as they present their poems. With a history of
artistic excellence and grassroots
support, this program reaches a broad
community of school age children,
families, poets, artists and
environmentalists with poetry, art, and
current information about our natural
landscape. The Watershed Festival is a
collaboration between Robert Hass, Poetry
Flash, the Ecology Center/Berkeley
Farmers' Market, and EcoCity
Builders. Calendar
Editors Event: Seventh
Annual Watershed Poetry
Festival Featuring:
Robert Hass, Mexican poet and
environmentalist Homero Aridjis, poet and
translator Jerome Rothenberg, Native
American writer Linda Hogan, novelist and
naturalist Brenda Peterson, Beat poet
Michael McClure with jazz flutist Larry
Kassin, environmentalist Jarid Manos from
the Great Plains Restoration Council, plus
many other poets, environmental activists,
musicians, and naturalists. Also: River
Village environmental and literary
exhibits and interactive events for the
entire family; We Are Nature Open Reading
(sign up at the Festival) When: Saturday,
September 7, noon-5 p.m. Where: Civic
Center Park, Martin Luther King Jr. Way at
Center Street, Berkeley Pre-festival
event: Strawberry Creek Walk, with
featured poets and creek restoration
advocates, begins 10 a.m. at Oxford and
Center Streets, Berkeley Admission to all
events: Free Sponsoring
organizations: Poetry Flash, Ecology
Center/Berkeley Farmers' Market, EcoCity
Builders Information:
(510) 526-9105 or
www.poetryflash.org Selected
Watershed Presenter Bios Robert Hass Robert Hass,
U.S. Poet Laureate 1995-97, was the first
U.S. Poet Laureate from the West; during
his tenure he attracted national media
attention to poetry and to the importance
of American nature writing. He has
received two National Book Critics Circle
Awards in different categories, once for
his volume of essays, Twentieth Century
Pleasures and once for poetry. His
acclaimed books of poetry include Human
Wishes, Praise, Field
Guide, and, most recently, Sun
Under Wood. The Los Angeles
Times called it "…Hass at his
best. It is a book to reread, always with
the lucky sense of walking through a
meadow with a friend, deep in the best
kind of exchange." His many literary
honors include the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Fellowship --the "Genius
Award"--and the Yale Series of Younger
Poets Award. Robert Hass has edited and
translated many books including The
Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson,
and Issa and Transtromer's Selected
Poems: 1954-1986. He has also
co-translated many collections by the
great Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet,
Czeslaw Milosz, including Unattainable
Earth and Provinces, and
contributed to Dante's Inferno:
Translations by Twenty Contemporary
Poets. He is also the author of
Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday
Life, drawn from his nationally
syndicated "Poet's Choice"
columns. Robert Hass combines
writing and environmentalism in his own
poetry and in his work for literacy across
the United States. In addition to
initiating the Watershed Festival, he
founded River of Words, an environmental
and arts education organization for
students K-12. In 1997, he was selected
Educator of the Year by the North American
Association on Environmental Education.
Robert Hass is professor of English at UC
Berkeley. Homero Aridjis Homero Aridjis
is Mexico's most important living poet
since the death of Nobel laureate Octavio
Paz, who personally helped launch
Aridjis's career. Aridjis's poetry is
remarkable, innovative and modernist, and
attempts to capture Mexico's 'lost
worlds': its native, indigenous cultures,
its natural beauty, its revolutionary
movements. He has published more than
twenty books of poetry and prose. Also a
columnist and environmental activist, he
is President of International P.E.N. A
diplomat, he was Mexico's Ambassador to
the Netherlands and Switzerland. His work
has been widely translated. Twice the
recipient of a Guggenheim, he has taught
at Columbia, New York University and the
University of Indiana. His new book,
Eyes to See Otherwise/Ojos de otro
mirar (New Directions, 2002), spans
and celebrates his forty-year career, with
translations from Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Philip Lamantia, W.S. Merwin, Kenneth
Rexroth, Jerome Rothenberg, Brian Swann,
Nathaniel Tarn, Eliot Weinberger, and
others. In 1987, he received
the Global 500 Award from the United
Nations Environment Program on behalf of
the Group of 100, an environmental group
of artists and intellectuals of which he
is co-founder and president. Largely
thanks to his efforts, many advances have
been made on pressing environmental issues
in Mexico: Monarch butterfly sanctuaries
have received official protection, the
slaughter of sea turtles has been made
illegal, dams were not built in the
Lacandon rain forest, and environmental
awareness has vastly increased among the
population. He successfully spearheaded
the campaign to stop the saltworks from
being built at San Ignacio lagoon the most
pristine of the gray whale's breeding and
calving sites in Baja California. Now, he
is campaigning to keep the Mexican
government from developing the entire Baja
peninsula as part of its Nautical Ladder
project, which is aimed at attracting
millions of American boat owners to the
Sea of Cortes. "Homero Aridjis's poems
open a door into the light."--Seamus
Heaney Linda
Hogan Linda Hogan is
an award-winning Chickasaw poet, short
story writer, novelist, playwright, and
essayist who has played a prominent role
in the development of contemporary Native
American poetry, particularly in
relationship to environmental issues.
Booklist wrote in a starred review
of her new memoir, The Woman Who
Watches Over the World, "Transcendent
and cathartic, Hogan's indelible narrative
ultimately celebrates love, the 'mighty
force' that enables even the most harrowed
not only to endure but to grow in spirit
and wisdom." Power, Linda Hogan's
third novel, has been praised for its
beauty of language, mythical structure,
and allegorical strength. She is the
recipient of an American Book Award for
her poetry collection Seeing Through
the Sun, a Lannan Foundation Award,
and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her first
novel, Mean Spirit, was a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Book of
Medicines was a poetry finalist for
the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Her books also include Dwellings: A
Spiritual History of the Natural
World, and the novel Solar
Storms. She has written a documentary
narrative about the history of American
Indian Religious Freedom, Everything
Has a Spirit, aired on PBS. She makes
her home in Colorado. In recent years she has
been collaborating with acclaimed nature
writer and novelist Brenda Peterson, their
new anthology is The Sweet Breathing of
Plants: Women and the Green World. Her
just published collaboration with Brenda
Peterson is Sightings: The Gray Whale's
Mysterious Journey. "Hogan's complex
exploration of Native ways and the
environment at risk…distinctive and
haunting.--Kirkus Reviews. Brenda Peterson Brenda Peterson
is the Seattle-based author of over
thirteen books, including her new
award-winning memoir Build Me an Ark: A
Life with Animals, selected as "Best
Spiritual Book of 2001" by Spirituality
and Health magazine. Her third novel,
Duck and Cover, was selected as a
New York Times "Notable Book of the
Year." Her essay collections, including
Living by Water, its sequel
Singing to the Sound: Visions of
Nature, Animals, and Spirit, and Nature
and Other Mothers have established her
as a leading nature writer. For the past
two decades, Brenda Peterson has studied
and written about marine mammals and the
environment, swimming with wild dolphins
all over the world and writing extensively
about cetacean conservation. Her writings
have been selected for over forty
anthologies and textbooks. With co-editors
Linda Hogan and poet and novelist Deena
Metzger, Brenda Peterson edited the
best-selling anthology Intimate Nature:
The Bond Between Women and Animals.
She collaborated with Linda Hogan on their
recent anthology, The Sweet Breathing
of Plants: Women and the Green World.
Her brand new book, also edited with Linda
Hogan, is Sightings: The Gray Whales'
Mysterious Journey (National
Geographic Books), written after seven
years of following the whale's marathon
annual journey. "Brenda Peterson is
amazing, a soulful and profound observer
of nature--from whales to humans--in all
their glory and distress."--Diane
Ackerman. Jarid Manos Jarid Manos is
founder and Executive Director of Great
Plains Restoration Council. He organizes
at the interaction of social change, the
environment and animal protection. Of
mixed Arab-African and Latin blood, Jarid
Manos is a multiracial survivor of both
the streets and the Mad Max hell of
the back country American West. His work
for social change is rooted in personal
experience. He remains a vigilant freedom
fighter for the buffalo and the prairie
dog, two of America's most persecuted
non-human races. Manos has worked on a
variety of activist campaigns, from the
Persian Gulf War to the Arctic national
Wildlife Refuge to heated local battles
against racist polluters in the inner city
neighborhoods of the urban Plains. A
longtime vegetarian athlete (now vegan)
and martial arts enthusiast, Jarid Manos
is currently working on his upcoming first
book, Ghetto Plainsman. The Great
Plains Restoration Council, based in Fort
Worth and Denver, is a multiracial
non-profit organization building the
Buffalo Commons step-by-step by bringing
the wild buffalo back and restoring
healthy, sustainable communities to the
Great Plains from the Indian Reservation
to the prairie outback to the inner city
and beyond. Michael McClure Michael McClure
has published over fifteen books of
poetry, two novels, five books of essays
and nine plays. His brand new poetry book
is Plum Stones; his Touching the
Edge received the Bay Area Book
Reviewers Poetry Award in 2000; his recent
book also include Rain Mirror;
Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat
Poems (with an introduction by Robert
Creeley); Rebel Lions, and
Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature,
and the Visionary. He is also the
author of Scratching the Beat Surface,
Essays on New Vision From Blake to
Kerouac. Timothy Ferris, author of
The Mind's Sky, wrote of it:
"Everybody talks about the gulf dividing
scientific and literary culture. Michael
McClure is trying to do something about
it." Michael McClure's work was recently
included by the author Rod Phillips in
Forest Beatniks and Urban Thoreaus:
Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and
Michael McClure. McClure is also an
internationally produced playwright (he
wrote the Obie-winning play Josephine
the Mouse Singer and The
Beard). He was the youngest of the
five poets who read at the famed Six
Gallery reading which began the Beat
Generation in San Francisco. Jack Kerouac
named him Pat McLear in his novel Big
Sur; Janis Joplin popularized
McClure's song Mercedes Benz.
McClure also performs his poetry and tours
with Ray Manzarek of the Doors; their new
CD is There's a Word.
"…Michael McClure shares a place with
the great William Blake, with the
visionary Shelley, with the passionate
D.H. Lawrence…"--Robert Creeley. Jerome
Rothenberg Jerome
Rothenberg has long been a central
mover in the development of an
ethnopoetics "as a necessary component of
any truly innovative poetics." He is
celebrated as a powerful reader of his
works as well as for the depth of his
scholarship. "Jerome Rothenberg is a DNA
spaceman exploring the mammal caves of
Now."--Michael McClure. Jerome Rothenberg
is the author of over sixty books of
poetry including Poems for the Game of
Silence, Poland/1931, A Seneca
Journal, Vienna Blood, That
Dada Strain, New Selected Poems
1970-1985, Khurbn, The Lorca
Variations, Seedings & Other
Poems, and A Paradise of Poets
(all from New Directions); he has also
translated the work of a wide range of
poets. Describing his poetry career as "an
ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic
past from the point of view of the
present," he has also edited five major
anthologies of traditional and
contemporary poetry: Technicians of the
Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin
(American Indian poetry), America a
Prophecy, Revolution of the
Word, and A Big Jewish Book.
And with Diane Rothenberg, he edited with
commentaries Symposium of the Whole, A
Range of Discourse Toward an
Ethnopoetics. Since the late 1950s, he
has been involved with various aspects of
poetry performance, including a theatrical
version of his book, Poland/1931,
by Hanon Reznikov and the Living Theater,
and a musical version of Khurbn
(with composer Charlie Morrow and Japanese
novelist Makoto Oda) produced for the
Bread & Puppet Theater in 1995. An
important two-volume global anthology of
twentieth-century poetry, Poems for the
Millennium (co-edited with Pierre
Joris), was published in 1995 and 1998 by
the University of California Press, and
another large anthology, A Book of the
Book, appeared last year from Granary
Books. His work has been
recognized with a Guggenheim fellowship,
several awards from the National Endowment
for the Arts, two PEN Oakland Josephine
Miles Awards for poetry, a PEN Center USA
West Award for translation, an American
Book Award for his selected writings on
poetics, and an honorary doctorate from
the State University of New York. He has
until recently been a professor of visual
arts and literature at the University of
California, San Diego. "Jerome Rothenberg is
an exception to the general misuse of
Native America. His book, A Seneca
Journal, misses the quality of voyeurism
that too often characterizes poetic
attempts at Indianismo, and becomes a
record of the meaning of life within the
American land.…This is an example of
the kind of borrowing that is possible:
one that allows the dignity of giver and
taker to remain not only undisturbed, but
celebrated, illuminated, made clear."
Because Jerome Rothenberg understands his
own origins, because he knows his fathers
and how his being arises of/from theirs,
he can accept and articulate his Seneca
experience justly."--Paula Gunn
Allen "Jerome Rothenberg is
one of the truly contemporary American
poets who has returned U.S. poetry to the
mainstream of international modern
literature. At the same time he is a true
auctochthon. Only here and now could have
produced him--a swinging orgy of Martin
Buber, Marble Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and
Sitting Bull. No one writing poetry today
has dug deeper into the roots of
poetry."--Kenneth Rexroth |
