Results tagged “lindabierds”

Wow! Today's Friday the twelfth, and that leaves you all of twelve shopping days till Christmas. Which sort of sucks, since you're probably a little nervous about the state of the economy and whatnot and thinking that maybe fattening up the old savings account is a wiser move than buying a new Wii Fit. But insofar as gifts are an unavoidable fact of the holidays, we here at Seattlest thought we'd offer you some clever gift ideas for the holidays with an emphasis on both your budget and what you can do to help grease the wheels of the local economy just a bit.

To mark the centennial of Theodore Roethke’s birth, poets Linda Bierds, Andrew Feld, Richard Kenney, Colleen McElroy, Heather McHugh, and Pimone Triplett are gathering to read and talk about Roethke, who inspires that kind of devotion, whether you knew him personally or not. The Washington Center for the Book, Poetry Society of America, and University of Washington Creative Writing Program are throwing the party at the Seattle Public Library, in the Microsoft Auditorium. It's this Wednesday, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., and it's free.

For a MacArthur-proclaimed genius, Linda Bierds is fairly low profile. She lives on Bainbridge Island, teaches in the English department at the University of Washington, and has had tons of poems published in mainstream literary magazines such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker, the holy grail of "someone who's not an MFA student has read my poetry" achievement. Tomorrow night she's at the UW Bookstore (7:00 p.m., free), reading from her new book, Flight.

Poets in particular seem to struggle with a bipolar mind, as discussed in Touched with Fire. But perhaps that visibility is just because they're poets, and inclined to make terrific material out of any experience. The new poetry anthology from Eastern Washington University, Living in Storms, shows no let-up to the harsh weather:

Schramm has collected more than a hundred poems by some four-score contemporary poets whose lives have been affected in various ways by bipolar disorder....

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