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If you would be a poet, write living newspapers….

Don't ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Dear Friend and Reader,

As Poetry Flash begins its 40th anniversary year, there is a lot to be grateful for. We have launched a new look and vision for Poetryflash.org, with monthly issues. The clean design by our new online editor Amy Wong updates daily literary events for all of California in an easy to find format. Poetryflash.org, a kind of "living newspaper," also features book reviews, essays, tributes, calls for submissions, poems, and online archives. Thousands of you have visited the new site. Currently featured on our December issue's front page are a retrospective essay on Ferlinghetti's work by Jack Foley, a full-length interview with So Cal poet Tony Barnstone, reviews of Lisa Robertson's R's Boat by Melissa Mack, Eugene Ruggles's Roads of Bread by Richard Silberg, Dean Rader's Works & Days by Zara Raab, Amina Saïd's The Present Tense of the World by Zack Rogow, novelist Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot by Jessy Goodman, a personal essay on reading Anne Carson's Nox by Lauren Crux, and new poems by Matt Shears, Mary Mackey, and Ben Bloch. Poetryflash.org's next issue features a round-up by John Oliver Simon, Firefly Under the Tongue by Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander, Solar Poems by Homero Aridjis, and Before Saying Any of the Great Words by David Huerta, with Megan Harlan's review of Jennifer Sweeney's How to Live on Bread and Music, among many other treats.

Poetryflash.org serves all of California and beyond. In northern California, Poetry Flash has curated and presented readings since 1982, now at Moe's great bookstore in Berkeley at least two Thursdays a month, and one Sunday a month at beautiful Diesel, A Bookstore, in Oakland. In keeping with the Flash's project of celebrating all the voices, the reading series has featured a vibrant spectrum of poets, nationally famous to locally acclaimed, experimental to mainstream, Beat to maverick. Among the poets we've presented in 2011 are Willis Barnstone, Sharon Doubiago, Paul Hoover, Mary Mackey, Eliot Schain, Gary Young, David Meltzer, Joseph Lease, Donna de la Perriere, Gloria Frym, Maxine Hong Kingston, James Ragan, Maxine Chernoff, Jaime Robles, Matthew Shears, Atsuro Riley, Alexandra Teague, Andrew Joron, Jack and Adelle Foley, Michael McClure, Al Young, Xochiquetzal Candelaria, Robin Ekiss, Keith Ekiss, Genine Lentine, Derek Mong, Joni Wallace, Bruce Isaacson, Toni Mirosevich, Brian Teare, Peter O'Leary, Barbara Henning, Steve Katz, Lynn Emanuel, Ish Klein, Joshua Edwards, Dan Bellm, Tiffany Higgins, Fred Marchant, Richard Tillinghast, Alan Williamson, Deborah Bogen, Gerald Fleming, Julie Carr, Lightsey Darst, John Oliver Simon, Judy Grahn, Megan Harlan, Mari L'Esperance, Katherine Hastings, and more. The Poetry Flash reading series is one of the longest running, most diverse, and most acclaimed bookstore reading series in the country.

Your support is key to our ability to keep Poetryflash.org and our nationally recognized reading series at Moe's Books, Berkeley and Diesel, A Bookstore, Oakland going into 2012. Poetry Flash also needs your support for the 31st Northern California Book Awards on April 22, 2012, at San Francisco Main Library's Koret Auditorium. Sponsoring these awards with Northern California Book Reviewers and celebrating (and recommending) these books strengthens our shared culture. Your contribution will also support the 17th annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival at Berkeley's Civic Center Park, next fall, September 29, 2012, with its Watershed Poets presentation at Berkeley High School and Strawberry Creek Walk through downtown Berkeley.

Our outline for the future is a dynamic mix of online and print publication. We believe that Poetryflash.org and a "hard copy" Poetry Flash will, in the future, work best in tandem, and together are of great utility and significance. In 2012, we will continue to develop this idea. Your support is needed to keep Poetry Flash's publication vision alive.

Poetry Flash continues to provide literary experiences, insights, information, and inspiration to the West Coast and beyond. We build community through literature and make more contemporary literature accessible, whether through events, readings, awards, or publication. Back to wise Ferlinghetti, who wrote: "Poetry the common carrier/ for the transportation of the public/ to higher places/ than other wheels can carry it." In 2012, Poetry Flash will continue to explore contemporary poetics and creative writing. We need your support to continue our shared publishing adventure and our literary projects that have served poetry and creative writing so well. We especially need your help now. Please join us by sending a tax-deductible donation check today, or visit http://poetryflash.org/give/ to contribute by credit card.

Warmest thanks,

Joyce Jenkins, Editor/Executive Director

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Poetry Flash is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, federal tax ID #94-3096270. Donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.