Seven Cirlces Press- 3 Poems!

Great news! Seven Circles Press, an online and print journal, has accepted three poems for publication: " Accident Of Clouds", " Village South Of The River" and "A Song Without Music". They will be available in print Feb 2010 and online soon at www.sevencirclespress.com.

I'm Reading Sunday's Headlines....

More wonderful news this week! One of my newer poems within my chapbook "The House We Live In", still attempting publication, has been accepted by New Verse News. This chapbook is mainly a series of questions, poltical and social, and is a search for their answers. The poem "I'm Reading Sunday's Headlines That Call for Things Like Justice" is now headlining at http://newversenews.blogspot.com. Please help support and check it out. Comments, as always, are more than welcome...

March 4th on September 11th

After a long conversation last night with two fellow conspirators, friends, and poets bent on removing the astro turf on the uneven playing field of contemporary poetry, I am excited to find Folly Magazine, an online and print journal of poetry and aesthetics, has accepted my poem March 4th. Awaiting word as to publication date. But please check out their website at www.follymag.com...

Infidelities at Mad Poets Review

Upon return from Vienna I have happily found Mad Poets Review will be publishing my poem Infidelities in their upcoming Fall 2009 print edition. Website: www.madpoetssociety.com.

Confessional Hymns x2

Please check out the new September online issue of Stirring: A Literary Collection, www.sundress.net/stirring, where my poem Confessional Hymns has been published for a second time.

CONFESSIONAL HYMNS


Bless us, fertile new morning.

Bless the barrage of tangerine light
streaming through the thawing pines.
Bless the slight wisps penetrating within
these bedroom windows,
balancing upon her forehead.

To whoever misses the conch’s hermetic ocean voice
grinding and honking down the avenues,
bless those ears pressed to concrete
who know history never fully unfurls.

Bless the gathering hummingbirds
who resuscitate night’s lost shadows,
swarming into a single crab
splayed across our bedroom wall,
legs furiously kicking the air.

Bless the beasts conquered and belly up,
accepting without pretense the slaughter and their breath.
Bless all the things each sea coughs up.
Bless their ignorance, their well-lit tree within.
Bless the bountiful cold waves
sleep polishes our wounds,
our nightly flight taken with Icarus
and our awaking moments before the sea opens its mouth.

Bless the moment between waking and understanding,
when such purity of new morning blinds us
to what the night undid.

The Moonlit Poetry Caravan- this Friday

Date:
Friday Sept. 4, 7pm

Location:
Cafe Delirium
308 N Main Ave
Gresham, OR 97030

Portland, OR upcoming reading- friend and cohort A. Molotkov to be reading

Oregon Literary Review co-hosts First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 3519 NE 44th off Fremont, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over. Contact Julie Mae Madsen at maemadsen@gmail.com for more information.

The readers for September 2 are Bruce Greene, David Cooke, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk, A. Molotkov, & Evan Cooper.

This night features writers of a successful Portland writing group The Guttery (http://www.theguttery.com/)

Bruce Greene taught for 33 years at an urban high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a teacher-consultant for the Bay Area Writing Project at UC Berkeley for the last 20 years, he’s published numerous articles on educational issues in his own practice as well as personal essays based on his experiences and observations. An avid thoroughbred horse lover, and frequent contributor to The Blood-Horse magazine, he served as Northern California correspondent from 1985-2000. Bruce now lives and writes in Portland, Oregon and is currently looking for three new streams to fly fish, two more coffeehouses conducive to writing, and one literary agent for his recently completed memoir, Above This Wall: The Life and Times of a VISTA Volunteer 1969-70.

David Cooke is a former middle school special education teacher who operates a landscape maintenance business aptly named The Lawn Guy. He is a founding member of two writing groups– Leora: A Writing Group and The Guttery. He graduated from both the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Portland State University Masters of Special Education program. Raised Catholic in Oakland, California, he now resides in Lake Oswego, Oregon with painter, Jessica Acevedo. His debut as the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize winner is available in The Hunger Mountain Journal online and in print. He is currently compiling a chapbook entitled Discretion.

Before landing in Portland, Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk lived all over. She learned kickboxing in Turkey, faced-off with a rhino in Nepal, discussed the weather with Queen Elizabeth in England, and was chastised by Mother Theresa in India. She’s now proud to declare herself a coffee mug carryin’, microbrew drinkin’, Powell browsin’, environmental stumpin’, trail hikin’ Portlander. She writes novels about the adventures that occur when the will of the individual and the collective muscle of a culture clash.

A. Molotkov is a writer, composer, filmmaker and visual artist. Born in Russia, he moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. He is the author of several novels, short story and poetry collections and the winner of the 2008 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award. The winning story “Round Trip” has been nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Award and accepted by Intramel for publication in Italian. A. Molotkov’s poetry and short stories have appeared in over a dozen publications, both in print and online. Visit him at www.AMolotkov.com

Evan Cooper is a writer of fiction. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from Willamette University and an M.A. in Media and Culture from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. He often rolls them up and uses them for house fly-icide and K-9 reprimands. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.

Power Outage acceptance

Pure Francis, an online literary journal, has accepted for their upcoming Winter 2009 edition my poem Power Outage. Please check it out at purefrancis.org. I'll let you know when it's available online.

Black and White (if only Read all over)

My poem Black and White, a musing written in Texas about the Guadelupe Mountains, the clarify of old movies, and the swagger of the soul has been accepted by San Pedro River Review, a print poetry and art publication. The Fall 2009 issue comes out in September. Their website, which gives guidelines and info, is www.sprreview.com. I'm excited that this poem in particular found its meandering way into a journal named after the ancient river flowing from Sonora, Mexico to Arizona...it feels fitting...

Silent in Hand....

A fairly new poem, Silent in Hand, written just before my move to Oregon, has just been accepted for the Fall 2009 print edition of Third Wednesday, a journal who last year published another piece. Their website is thirdwednesday.org. Please support and check them out!

new Literary Bohemian out Monday!

Monday, 8/10, the next issue of Literary Bohemian will be out. It's a unique venue for literary travel writing, poetry, and tidbits: snapshots of our varied journeys. Check it out at www.literarybohemian.com. My poem Icelandic Horses found its way into this issue, via one path or another...

...........A Handkerchief Waving......

A Handkerchief Waving, a two year old poem I'd fought hard to get published, has now been accepted at Wild Goose Poetry Review. In October their Fall 2009 issue will be out. Please check it out at: www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com.

new flickr account

To keep up with my burgeoning interest in photography and to relay some images to friends back East, I've just created a flickr account: www.flickr.com/photos/johnsibleywilliams. Should be new shots up fairly frequently. Feel free to comment on them, as I'm just beginning to understand the rudimentary basics of photography....

Glass: A Journal of Poetry New Issue Out!

Glass: A Journal of Poetry Issue Two Volume Two is now available at www.glass-poetry.com/volume-two/issue-two. There you'll find a segment of my poem And Then Like a Saber, a strange, hopefully dangerous love poem.....

Their motto:
"Poetry that enacts the artistic and creative purity of glass"

poor little Gregor Samsa and his metaphor

Once a little metaphor exhausted of its meaning, crept from the abstraction it was born to represent, and attempted to live within the world itself...that was the little fairy tale dreamt to write the poem "Gregor Samsa", which Other Rooms just accepted. It will be posted soon at http://otherroomspress.blogspot.com.

Help support the hungry, tired metaphors...they need your help!!!

Hypotheticals.......at Poet's Ink

Wonderful news! It's been an astounding week for publications. Upon returning from a photography trip to the Oregon coast, I've received word my poem Hypotheticals will be published in the September issue of Poet's Ink. Please support both myself and their publication by checking it and their other work out at poetsink.com. This poem was a musing on what is left undone in life, particularly the lack of certain concrete things, like children, things expected but oft not fulfilled, and whether that in itself signifies failure....

Open Letters

Open Letters: A Monthly Arts and Literature Review http://openlettersmonthly.com will be publishing my poem Surely I'm Convinced in their January 2010 Poetry issue. The editor references the poem's "Stevens-like ambiguity", which are very kind words indeed...

new Wilderness House Literary Review now out!

Check out www.whlreview.com/#poetry for the new Wildnerness Literary Review, containing some excellent work of poetry, fiction, and essays, including two of my love poems......

ahh, the art of raining...

Silenced Press (silencedpress.com), a journal and small literary press, has just accepted The Art of Raining for their online publication. Please check them out! I adore the quote prefacing this poem, a single line amidst the chaos of Pablo Neruda's intelligent and oft big-headed memoir. I still cannot confine with definition 'the art of raining', cannot build walls around or perspective upon a concept as fluid as the metaphor within it, but it yawns and stretches within me back to childhood, through the future, seeming to connect every memory I cherish and every memory I fear...the art of raining...something we cannot lose...

The Art of Raining

“The art of raining…has now been lost.”
-Pablo Neruda, Memoirs


I walked blindly into her hands,
the sea somewhere behind me,
asking why.

What fire, wind, and rain
has chosen to leave standing
and the ferocity of the vanished’s

returning, often in conversations silenced
over vast tablefuls of food and friends,
that moment all consent to mass introspection,

often too in bullet casings, polished silver,
lodged in the lung of endless answer-waiting,
when extraction could shut down the whole system.

Once we spoke the unspeakable, but no longer.
Is this the belief she whispers to my sleep, as if from Isla Negra?
That somehow tears are wine if we admit our weeping?

The sky over the sea, blindly eyeing my back,
storms and calms and wonders
why our countless words for rain.

To it there is one, synonymous with love,
and one for love, synonymous with why,
and one for why, synonymous with rain.

Poem in an Upcoming Chapbook- River Anthology

The River Poets Journal (www.riverpoetsjournal.com) will be publishing a chapbook later this year anthologizing poems about specific rivers. I am excited to hear my poem, Two Hometowns on the Same River, will be included! If interested, they are still accepting submissions for this chapbook until 9/30/09 (guidelines online). Two Hometowns on the Same River was composed about the Danube, which connects many major Eastern and Central European cities, and near which a friend's father grew up in a small village in Romania. After a long conversation with him at a wedding, in which he half-drunkenly rolled through a litany of childhood memories, I returned to my own memories of the river...resulting in this poem...

River Poets Journal Publishing Love Poem "Reunion"

Reunion, a multi-sectioned love poem written in Vienna, has now been accepted by River Poets Journal. The issue in which it will be published is due Oct./Nov. 2009. Please check out the journal at www.riverpoetsjournal.com.

Hawaii and Portland

It's presently 3:50am and I've just woken for my flight to Portland and beginnings of new experiences, friends, poetries, and fresh air to find a journal I admire, The Hawaii Review, has accepted my poem This Other Island for their upcoming print edition. What a wonderful way to inaugurate this new journey in my life!

Aries - poetry acceptance

More good news this week! Aries: A Journal of Creative Expression has accepted my poem Foreigner for publication in their 2009 print edition. The poem was written about my time in Greece, though it could be anywhere, about the fears and odd pleasures of anonimity. Please check out their website at www.department.txwes.edu/aries/Aries.htm.

Literary Bohemian in August

Literary Bohemian, an online journal of adventurers, wanderers, and seekers of experiences and peoples, has accepted my poem Icelandic Horses for their August 2009 issue. Check them out at www.literarybohemian.com.

...Keep Driving...

I've always rather liked this poem, Keep Driving, and am excited that after quite a bit of effort since its conception last summer it has finally found a home. Concho River Review, a 22-year-old print journal from Angelo State University in Texas, will be publishing it in its Spring 2010 issue. Concho River's website is www.angelo.edu/dept/english/conchoriverreview.html.

Arlington Literary Journal Issue 27 out!

Issue 27 of ArLiJo is out, available at www.arlijo.com. Three poems had previously been accepted here. I've included one below, a poem from Iceland's endless sagging-roofed empty fisheries. Please check out the other two, The Day Before and From Under a Sari, on the website!

Distant Vacation


Of all industry- the gutted refinery, sagging like a body
unused, that still cries from the ceiling
last month’s rain.


Step outside, into winter, and the Northern
Lights spume alien green, distend, pressed
between the two glass slides-


endless night and its soil. Why the distance
of words like alien? What is being enlarged,
investigated, the illnesses in our blood.


White cells, too low. Something
of the unknowable elicits a promise
that it resides in us too, that foreign


tricks of light are our tongues,
that a fishery rotted still stands
because someone someday will replaster the ceiling.


It is too dark to recognize as more than shadow
the unpenned horses and mangy wads of sheep above.
But something must exist to cast them


forty feet long down the white hill.
The pigeons cling desperately to the village steeple.
The unmanned ships in the harbor still prowl for fish.

From the Moonlit Poetry Caravan- Portland, OR- www.meetup.com/MoonlitPoetry

A. Molotkov
http://www.discord-aggregate.com/AMolotkov/









Shawn Austin

April

Cafe Delirium- Gresham, OR

White Whale Issue 1.2 Out!

Please check out www.whitewhalereview.com for the long-awaited Issue 1.2, which contains three of poems alongside work I admire, especially for such a young magazine.

Flowers in September...

My poem Flowers, written about the gypsy women and children who swarm markets and outdoor cafes in central Europe with their sad stories selling flowers to tourists, has just been accepted for September 2009 publication in The Shine Journal, an online publication seeped in natural spirituality and beauty. Check it out then at http://theshinejournal.com!!