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WATERSHED Saturday,
September 24, 2005
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Noon to 5 pm
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Free For Immediate Release:
September 5, 2005 For More Information
Contact: Mark Baldridge:
510-526-9105 •••••••••••••••••••• TENTH ANNUAL SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24,
NOON TO 5 P.M. Join National Book Critics
Circle Award-winning poet
Robert
Hass with
musicians, artists, and
environmentalists on Saturday,
September 24, noon to 5 p.m. as
they celebrate the 10th
anniversary of the Watershed
Environmental Poetry Festival at
an exciting new location, the
Valley Life Sciences lawn,
University of California,
Berkeley campus, just inside the
west entrance off of Oxford
Street between University Avenue
and Center Street. This lush,
grassy spot overlooks Strawberry
Creek, and is one block east of
downtown Berkeley BART. A free day of poetry, music,
and interactive events, the
festival presents Ruth Lilly
Award-winning poet Kay
Ryan reading from
her new book The Niagara
River, famed Beat poet
Joanne
Kyger, Brenda
Hillman reading
from her new book Pieces of
Air in the Epic, and poet and
nature essayist Alison
Hawthorne Deming
reading from her new book
Genius Loci. Poet and
performance artist Kamau
Daáood,
author of The Language of
Saxophones, will appear with
jazz bassist Marcus
Shelby. The Berkeley
National Poetry
Slam team will
perform, along with Voices of the
Watershed, Shasta Bioregion poets
curated by Nevada City poet
Chris Olander; and student
and youth poets from River of
Words, California Poets in
the Schools, and Center for
the Art of Translation's
Poetry Inside Out.
Raquel
Rivera
Pinderhughes,
author of Alternative Urban
Futures: Planning for Sustainable
Development in Cities Throughout
the World, and Huey
D. Johnson, winner
of the UNEP Sasakawa
Environmental Prize in 2001, will
also speak. The Smooth
Toad band will be playing
country blues music throughout
the afternoon. Festival goers
that what to participate in the
We Are Nature open reading should
sign up at the information booth
by noon. Greeting festival participants
on the approach to the site will
be new art created especially for
Watershed by acclaimed Bolinas
artist Arthur Okamura,
professor emeritus at California
College of Arts. He has created
"Flower Serpentine," a 200-foot
installation featuring flowers
made of recycled newspapers and
magazines mounted on 2,000
recycled chopsticks. Okamura's
Balinese Peace Flags,
Watershed-flow banners, and
gold-veined Bodhi Leaf screen
will surround the Watershed
stage. River Village, consisting
of literary, arts, and
environmental exhibits, will
circle the seating area. A Creek Walk and Poetry
Workshop, open to all, will begin
the celebration at 10 a.m.
Starting from the Berkeley
Farmer's Market, Martin Luther
King Jr. Way and Center Street,
the Walk will be led by the
Salmon Bicycle, direct
from Burning Man, with scales
made from discarded CDs. This
walking/writing meditation on
place will trace the route of
Strawberry Creek as it tunnels
beneath downtown Berkeley to its
"daylighted" condition at the
Festival site. Featured poets
will read poetry, responding to
the creek's condition, and
restoration advocates will
discuss the why and how of
"daylighting." Poems begun on the
Creek Walk will be compiled and
sent to the Berkeley City Council
to support "Daylighting," and
three of the poems will be
published in Poetry Flash
magazine. Watershed is proud to
celebrate ten years of excellence
as a grassroots event that
inspires a community of school
age children, families, students,
poets, artists, and
environmentalists with knowledge
about our natural world through
poetry and the arts. The Watershed Festival is a
collaboration between Robert Hass
and the UC Berkeley English
Department, Poetry Flash, the
Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmer's
Market, and EcoCity Builders.
Watershed was created from Robert
Hass's national Watershed
initiative to explore the
connection between the
environment and the American
literary imagination during his
tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate,
1995&endash;97. Lawn seating. Bring a
picnic. Photos available upon request.
For more information, or to
exhibit, call Watershed/Poetry
Flash at (510) 526-9105, or see
www.poetryflash.org CALENDAR
EDITORS 10th
Annual 10 A.M.
Opening Creek Walk, with poetry
writing and reading led by Chris
Olander, talks by Watershed
restoration experts, readings by
participating poets. All
events free and open to all.
FESTIVAL
PARTICIPANTS Featured
poets: Kamau Daáood,
Alison Hawthorne Deming, Robert
Hass, Brenda Hillman, Joanne
Kyger, Kay Ryan, and Berkeley
National Slam Team, 2004
Champions: Charles Ellik, Slam
Master. Voices
of the Watershed Poets: Daryl
Chinn, James Downs, Charles
Entrekin, Gail Rudd Entrekin,
Terri Glass, Rusty Morrison,
Chris Olander, Carlos Ramirez,
Julie Valin. Student
and youth poets from River of
Words, California Poets in
the Schools, Poetry Inside
Out. Music by
Smooth Toad: G.P. Skratz,
Andy Dinsmoor, Bob
Ernst. Environmental
Speakers: Helen Burke (City
of Berkeley Planning Commission),
Steve Maranzana (Environmental
Health and Safety Specialist, UC
Berkeley), Raquel Rivera
Pinderhughes , Ph.D. (Professor
of Urban Studies at San Francisco
State University), Glen Schneider
(naturalist). BIOGRAPHIES ROBERT
HASS 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&endash;12. In 1997, he was
selected Educator of the Year by
the North American Association on
Environmental Education. He is
Professor of English at UC
Berkeley. KAY
RYAN JOANNE
KYGER BRENDA
HILLMAN ALISON
HAWTHORNE DEMING KAMAU
DAÁOOD MARCUS
SHELBY, who will be appearing
with Kamau Daáood, is an
award winning composer, arranger,
educator and bassist working and
residing in the San Francisco Bay
Area. He studied under James
Newton and Charlie Haden and his
credits include original scoring
for film, theater and dance as
well as jazz composition for his
own groups, the 15-piece Marcus
Shelby Jazz Orchestra, the Marcus
Shelby Trio and the Marcus Shelby
Septet. He is nationally
recognized for his innovative and
collaborative approach to
composing and arranging for text,
the visual arts, dance and
theater. THE
BERKELEY POETRY SLAM is
widely seen as the epicenter of
the northern California Slam
scene. Most well-known poets come
to the event regularly, and
up-and-comers see it as THE place
to test their work. The event has
won "Best of the East Bay"
(East Bay Express 2003)
and hosts "moving verse" (New
York Times 2003) weekly. The
venue is home to teams that are
West Coast Regional Slam Champs
in 2002 and 2003, In 1999, two
Bay Area teams won first
place--SF/Berkeley and San
José. They opted to share
the glory and prize for the first
time in that competition's
history. HUEY
D. JOHNSON was the Western
Regional Director of the Nature
Conservancy; later founded and
served as President of the Trust
for Public Land. He was the
California Secretary for
Resources from 1978 to 1982.
After that, he founded the
Resource Renewal Institute. In
2001, Johnson was awarded the
United Nations Sasakawa
Environment Prize. Currently, he
heads the Resource Renewal
Institute and working on its
newest project, Defense of
Place. RAQUEL
RIVERA PINDERHUGHES, PhD, is
a professor of Urban Studies at
San Francisco State University
and author of Alternative Urban
Futures: Planning for Sustainable
Development in Cities Throughout
the World, which focuses on
planning and policy approaches
and appropriate technologies that
can be used to minimize a city's
impact on the environment while
providing urban residents with
the infrastructure and services
they need to sustain a high
quality of urban life. She's
currently both on the Board of
Directors of the Ecology Center
and of Urban Habitat, and is a
former City of Berkeley
Environmental Commissioner.
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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,
one for his volume of essays,
Twentieth Century
Pleasures, and one for
poetry. His books of poetry
include Field Guide,
Praise, Human
Wishes, 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&emdash;the "Genius
Award"&emdash;and the Yale Series
of Younger Poets Award. He 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 late 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 the
author of Poet's Choice: Poems
for Everyday Life, drawn from
his nationally syndicated "Poet's
Choice" columns. 
Kay
Ryan, 2004 winner of both the
$100,000 Ruth Lilly Prize and a
Guggenheim fellowship, has this
year published The Niagara
River, the third collection
in the Grove Press Poetry Series.
Her previous books include Say
Uncle, Elephant Rocks, Flamingo
Watching, Strangely Marked Metal,
and Dragon Acts to Dragon
Ends. J.D. McClatchey in
American Poet described her
writing as intense and elliptical
as Dickinson and as buoyant and
rueful as Frost. Among the many
places her work has appeared are
The New Yorker, the Atlantic, and
The Paris Review. She has
been awarded both National
Endowment for the Arts and Ingram
Merrill Foundation fellowships as
well as two Pushcart Prizes. Born
in San Jose, she grew up in San
Joaquin Valley and Mojave Desert
small towns and now lives in the
San Francisco Bay Area. She has
taught for more than 30 years at
the College of Marin.
Joanne
Kyger has published more than
25 books and broadsides,
including her most recent
selection of poetry, As
Ever, in the Penguin Poets
Series, containing some 40 years
of her writing. She arrived in
San Francisco from southern
California at the height of the
Howl obscenity trial and soon
became associated with Jack
Spicer, Robert Duncan, and other
poets of the San Francisco
Renaissance and the Beats. After
moving to Japan with Gary Snyder,
she also traveled to India with
Allen Ginsberg and Peter
Orlovsky, and her first book,
The Tapestry and the Web,
came out shortly after her
return. She has maintained a
lifelong interest in Buddhism and
teaches occasionally at the Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics at the Naropa Institute
in Boulder, Colorado. She's lived
in Bolinas since 1968.
Brenda
Hillman, whose poetry
collections have all been
published by Wesleyan University
Press, this year issued her
seventh, Pieces of Air in the
Epic. Her earlier works are
Cascadia, Loose
Sugar (National Book Critics
Circle finalist), Bright
Existence (Pulitzer Prize
finalist), Death
Tractates, Fortress,
and White Dress. She has
also written three chapbooks
(The Firecage; Autumn
Sojourn; and Coffee, 3
A.M.) and has edited an
edition of Emily Dickinson's
poetry for Shambhala Publications
and, with Patricia Dienstfrey,
co-edited The Grand
Permission: New Writings on
Poetics and Motherhood.
Among. Her many honors are
Fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the
Guggenheim Foundation, a Pushcart
Prize, and a Bay Area Book
Reviewer's Award. She holds the
Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at
St. Mary's College in Moraga and
is on the permanent faculties of
the Napa Valley Writers'
Conference and of the Squaw
Valley Community of
Writers.
Alison
Hawthorne Deming, noted
essayist and poet, earlier this
year published Genius
Loci, her third book of
poetry. Her second was
Monarchs: A Poem Sequence,
and her first, Science and
Other Poems, was selected by
Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman
Award of the Academy of American
Poets. His citation noted her
lucid and precise language, her
stunning metaphors, her passion,
her wild and generous spirit, her
humor, her formal cunning the
knowledge she displays and how
she puts this knowledge to a
poetic use and particularly the
wisdom that lies behind the
knowledge d. She has also
published three nonfiction books
(Writing the Sacred into the
Real, The Edges of the
Civilized World, and
Temporary Homelands) and
has appeared widely in magazines
and anthologies. Among her honors
are a Wallace Stegner Fellowship
at Stanford University, two
fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, and
numerous other fellowships,
awards, and residencies. She's
served on the faculty of many
writing programs and currently is
Professor in Creative Writing at
the University of
Arizona.
Kamau
Daaood makes his Watershed
debut this year. He's a
performance poet, educator, and
community arts activist who
issued his third book this past
spring, The Language of
Saxophones: Selected Works.
Booklist said this about it:
"Jazz at its core is cosmic, and
Daáood taps into its
unifying vision in his powerfully
percussive, prayerful, firmly
rooted yet soaring, direct and
accessible poetry." He's also
authored two earlier books of
poetry, Ascension and Liberator
of the Spirit. He developed his
literary skills in The Watts
Writers Workshop and his
bebop-flavored poetics in the Pan
African People's Arkestra. In
1989 he and master jazz drummer
Billy Higgins founded the World
Stage, a storefront performance
gallery that has transformed a
neighborhood--Leimert Park (the
title of his award-winning
CD)--into a hub of African
American cultural activity and
where he is Artistic Director.
Kamau has taught at California
State University Northridge and
has received honors from the USC
Master of Professional Writing
Program.