SAL/ON

A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures

Category: Poetry Series

Six Alice Walker Poems for Everyday Life in Seattle

By Danielle Palmer-Friedman, SAL Volunteer Who else is extremely excited to hear the eloquent, fiercely loving, and courageous Alice Walker read tonight at Benaroya Hall? This author and social activist is friends with Gloria Steinem, Yoko Ono, and Oprah (hello, dream book club!). Tickets will be available at the Benaroya Box Office tonight, which opens […]

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WITS Voices: The Courage Lessons

By Jamaica Baldwin, WITS Writer-in-Residence I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t […]

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How to Listen to Water

This season, SAL’s friends at Poetry Northwest are partnering with us to present reflections on visiting writers from our Poetry Series. Below, Michelle Peñaloza reviews Oceanic, the collection by Aimee Nezhukumatathil that Michelle calls “her best yet.”  Aimee Nezhukumatathil will read at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, May 21 at McCaw Hall to close out our 2017/18 Poetry Series. […]

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Lucie Brock-Broido Reads “Infinite Riches in the Smallest Room”

Many of us awoke to the sad news this morning that beloved poet Lucie Brock-Broido has passed away. Brock-Broido, the Director of Poetry and a professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia, once said during her 2014/15 SAL Poetry Series reading: “A poem goes driving, then hunting. I’m willing to go anywhere to […]

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Tyehimba Jess and the Voice of the Interior

Seattle poet and educator Quenton Baker, whose work focuses on anti-blackness and the afterlife of slavery, writes below on Tyehimba Jess’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Olio. Jess’s work weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of African American musicians from the Civil War era on, in an effort to understand how these performers met, resisted, and […]

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Three Poems by Theo Hadley

Pierre We realize perhaps we’ve been playing the waltz too slowly. We continue rapping our knuckles against the walls. Half of us learn how to dance, the rest of us learn how to cuff our jeans. Pierre has a bad day. He climbs the stairs and says No, Really too many times and then he […]

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Introductions: Gregory Orr

On February 7 at McCaw Hall, Gregory Orr—master of the personal lyric poem, and one of our greatest advocates for how the reading and writing of poetry can help us heal and live more fully—read from his three collections: Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved, How Beautiful the Beloved, and River Inside the River. SAL […]

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5 Reasons to See Gregory Orr

We can think of many reasons to see the master of the short, personal lyric, Gregory Orr, at his Poetry Series event on Wednesday at McCaw’s Nesholm Family Lecture Hall—here are just five! Tickets will be available at the door; the box office opens at 6:00 PM. For their Sunday After SAL program, Open Books: A […]

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That Ocean Inside Us

This season, SAL’s friends at Poetry Northwest are partnering with us to present reflections on visiting writers from our Poetry Series. Below, Washington State Poet Laureate Claudio Castro Luna gives us her insights on Gregory Orr’s poetry, exploring how the lyric form can bring catharsis in times of chaos and trauma. Gregory Orr will read as part of SAL’s […]

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