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WATERSHED Saturday,
August 18, 2007
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Berkeley For Immediate Release:
August 14, 2007 For news on the State of the
Planet, join Robert Hass,
former U.S. Poet Laureate, with
musicians, artists, and
environmentalists this Saturday,
August 18, noon to 4 p.m. at the
12th annual WATERSHED
Environmental Poetry Festival in
Civic Center Park, located one
block west of downtown Berkeley
BART, next to the Berkeley
Farmers' Market, Center Street at
Martin Luther King Jr. Way. A free day of poetry, music,
and interactive events, the
festival features award-winning
poet Robert
Hass reading
"State of the Planet" from his
forthcoming collection of
poems, Time and Materials.
Also on stage will be famed Beat
poet Michael
McClure with
saxophonist
George
Brooks, Montana Poet
Laureate Sandra
Alcosser,
critically acclaimed
author/cultural historian
Rebecca
Solnit, Poetry
Flash editor/poet Richard
Silberg, poet/naturalist
Maya
Khosla, student
and youth poets from River of
Words and California Poets
in the Schools, and Voices
of the Watershed readings
with poets Chris Olander,
Indigo Moor, Guarionex Delgado,
Chad Sweeney, Grace Grafton,
Jennifer K. Sweeney, and
Margot Pepper. The Toad
Pink band, with G.P.
Skratz, Hal Hughes, and
Jean Robertson, will play
country blues music throughout
the afternoon. To participate in
the We Are Nature open
reading, sign up at the
information booth by noon.
Environmental updates will be
provided by Kirstin Miller of
Ecocity Builders and Kirk
Lumpkin from the Ecology
Center. For those looking for an early
start, the pre-festival
Strawberry Creek Walk begins
at 10 a.m. just inside the
U.C. Berkeley campus at Oxford
and Center Streets. You are
invited to join our featured
readers and environmentalists for
a short hike along Strawberry
Creek from the U.C. Campus
through downtown Berkeley,
tracing the route of the creek as
it tunnels beneath the heart of
the city to the site of the
festival. At several points
throughout the walk, poets will
read from their work and
restoration advocates will
discuss efforts to "daylight" the
creek. At the WATERSHED Festival
site, the creek, which runs
directly beneath the park, will
be "miked" to play gently behind
the readers. In addition to the main stage
readings and performances, the
Festival encourages involvement
with the environment and
literature via River
Village, an area for
interactive arts, all-ages nature
activities, and literary and
environmental exhibits. Each year, the WATERSHED
Festival explores the connection
between the current spectrum of
the American literary imagination
and our landscape, natural
history, and sense of
environmental urgency, as
expressed through the work of our
featured writers and performers.
Past festival highlights have
included Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo,
Jimmy Santiago Baca, Diane di
Prima, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, John
Trudell, Brenda Hillman, Al
Young, Linda Hogan, Juan Felipe
Herrera, Lewis MacAdams, Kay
Ryan, Ernest Callenbach, Jerome
Rothenberg, Maxine Hong Kingston,
Pattiann Rogers, Jane Hirshfield,
Homero Aridjis, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, and many
others. Please join us in
celebrating writers, nature &
community! ROBERT HASS Robert Hass,
the festival's founder,
will be back to offer
the depth of his
presence and poetry;
U.S. Poet Laureate
1995-97, he will read
from his brand new
Time and Materials:
Poems 1997-2005, to
be published in October
2007. Here's a moment
from his longer poem,
"State of the Planet," a
clarion call for this
festival: Poetry
should be able
to comprehend
the earth, Topsoil:
going fast.
Rivers: dammed
and fouled. (from
Time and
Materials:
Poems
1997&endash;2005) MICHAEL McCLURE The great Beat poet
Michael McClure,
who received the 2000
Northern California Book
Award for Touching
the Edge, will
perform with saxophonist
George Brooks.
McClure wrote on the
ecoconsciousness of the
Beat Generation and the
early environmental
movement in
Scratching the Beat
Surface. SANDRA
ALCOSSER Sandra Alcosser
is Montana's first
Poet Laureate, and an
outstanding poet whose
book of poems A Fish
to Feed All Hungers
was chosen by James Tate
for the Associated
Writing Programs Award
Series and whose
collection Except by
Nature, was chosen
by Eamon Grennan for the
National Poetry
Series---he is also the
first Conservation Poet
for the Wildlife
Conservation Society and
Poets House in New York
City. Here's a glimpse
from "What Makes
Grizzlies Dance": Have you
never
wanted REBECCA SOLNIT Cultural historian
Rebecca Solnit,
best-selling author of
ten books, winner of the
National Book Critics
Circle Award and the
Northern California Book
Award for River of
Shadows: Eadweard
Muybridge and the
Technological Wild
West, the enormously
prolific and provocative
and inspirational
environmentalist and
antiglobalization
activist whose newest
book is Storming the
Gates of Paradise:
Landscapes for
Politics, will also
appear. In a side note,
she wrote about coming
upon the second
Watershed Festival, that
year being held in
Golden Gate Park, in her
book Wanderlust, A
History of
Walking. MAYA KHOSLA Maya Khosla is
the recipient of the
Dorothy Brunsman Award
for her manuscript
Keel Bone. She is
also the author of a
creative nonfiction book
about salmon, titled
Web of Water. Her
work is influenced both
by her background in
biology and her
childhood spent in
various
countries--England,
Algeria, Burma, Bhutan,
India, and
Bangladesh. |
