Welcome to Rachel Chidester of Utah Poetry Slam

RACHEL CHIDESTER is a native of Utah who gained interest in poetry as a teenager in high school while looking for her voice. Poetry Coach Chris Atkin got her into the competitive scene. After graduating from The New York Institute of Art and Design, Rachel joined Utah Poetry Slam, Rocky Mountain Poets, and Utah State Poetry Society to pursue her love of poetry and competition. She will be representing Utah while competing on a national stage in the Blackberry Peach National Prizes for Poetry: Spoken and Heard this coming October in Daytona Beach, Florida. (For more info, see https://www.nfsps.com/BBP3Guidelines.html) 

Her first chatbook The Cost of Living in Utah is Good Poetry has been published and will be available at Amazon. Rachel is also a locally awarded Visual Artist & an awarded Civic Engagement Advocate. Welcome to our group.

 

HUMILITY by Rachel Chidester

                              Humility is the butterfly we catch as children

                              And crush its wings

                              In an effort to play.

                              But it's the only way

                              to metamorphose

                              into peaceful creatures. 

Meet Our New Poet Laureate of Utah

LISA BICKMORE was born in Dover, Delaware, and grew up living all over the United States and in Japan. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Brigham Young University and is Professor Emeritus of English at Salt Lake Community College, where she was the recipient of the SLCC Foundation Teaching Excellence Award in 2006. At SLCC, she taught writing of all sorts, as well as publication studies, and is one of the founders of the SLCC Publication Center. As of 2019, she is the founder of the new nonprofit Lightscatter Press, which published its first book in April of 2021. 

We give her a warm welcome as an honorary member of the Utah State Poetry Society! She is the author of three books of poems: Haste (Signature Books, 1994), flicker, which won the 2014 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press, and Ephemerist (Red Mountain Press, June 2017).Read her published poem O Take and Seal It from the online journal Psaltery & Lyre. See https://psalteryandlyre.org/2021/04/12/o-take-and-seal-it/  

Meet Willy Palomo of Utah Slam Poetry Chapter

WILLY PALOMO (he/they/she) is the son of two immigrants from El Salvador. In 2018, he graduated with an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University. Writings can be found in Best New Poets 2018, Latino Rebels, Antologia de Posguerra, The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States, and more. He is a founding member of Plumas Colectiva, a literary and art collective of Latin creators in the 801. He is the Director of the Utah Humanities Book Festival and President of the newest UTSPS Chapter-UTAH POETRY SLAM. More info on how to join this group, see https://www.utahpoets.com/chapter-utah-poetry-slam/

   

                                    How I learned to read by Willy Palomo  

¿Are you mi Mama? 

beckoned the birdie in our favorite book. 

Cuddled and coddled, I want to brag, 

decirte that she read to me the most,

every night. Except if you ask Mama, it was 

faith, not education, not knowledge, but the Holy 

Ghost which gave her the power to understand the scriptures, when she,

humiliated, confessed to the missionaries she didn’t know how to read. 

It never occurred to me until 

just now that if her story is true, then she never actually read me anything as a 

kid. She must have looked at 

letters & saw nothing but another endless 

maze of streets & signs, another 

nameless map of New York, left to navigate

on pure faith and instinct. She’d interpret 

pictures the same way she’d memorize streets the same way she’d read

quiet gringos, smirking as she passed. In 1st grade, I made it my goal to teach her to

read. I took out all our books in front of guests, 

spilling a library of shame into the room. I’d correct her English 

the same way I’d correct her children’s stories the same way I now write her story 

under a language she will never call home. There’s not a word for her

verdad in English, no matter how many times I try 

write it down. From a country where poets are 

executed & literacy meant little more than signing away

your name next to an X, she taught me to walk without 

zapatos, to read without an alphabet shackling my tongue.

 

Steven Leitch UTSPS President graduates...

Sad news...too many of our poets are leaving us this year: our sweet energetic UTSPS president Steven Leitch graduated Jan 31, 2022. His leadership and enthusiasm will be greatly missed. Here's a blog about him. More details on his funeral, etc. soon.

2021 UTSPS Book of the Year-Michael Parker

 

MICHAEL PARKER's award winning book "Divining the Spirits in the House of the Hush and Hush" is now published. UTSPS members should be receiving their copy in the mail. 

Don’t miss his concert on Oct 16th at 2 pm via Zoom. All are invited but will need to register by Oct 9th at the latest to received a link. 

Contact Jon Sebba at <yossi.yasser.soldiers@gmail.com> AND Paul Ford <pmford3@gmail.com> to attend virtually. 

Meet MICHAEL PARKER  https://utahpoetry.blogspot.com/2017/05/meet-michael-parker-of-hinterland.html 

Meet ROBERT RIPPY from Dixie Poets

        Robert Rippy started writing in the early 1970's when he became friends with the poet DeWayne Rail. Through his encouragement and guidance, Robert enrolled in an MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of California-Irvine and received his degree in 1977. 

        For the next five years, he wrote poems which were published in small magazines. When his position at the college where he was teaching changed into a combination of administration and teaching, he pretty much stopped writing. 

        Thirty years later in 2016, he moved with his wife from Southern California to Sunriver in St. George and became involved in their Creative Writing group. Later, he joined Dixie Poets in St. George and is now an award winning poet. He has just published a collection of poems that is entitled Eroding into Something Else that features thirty-nine poems: fifteen from his early period and twenty-four from the last five years. 

        His poems cover a full range of topics from historical themes to observations of nature's beauty, family life and beyond. His skill and techniques are amazing.

Browse,  No Services

Sign along the highway says Browse 

highway that climbs through

this red part of Utah.
I pull off, note
there's not much
to be seen here,
just a dirt road losing its way
through the junipers.
I judge the car wouldn't make it,
that it's too damned hot
and move on.

But the sign stays with me–
that invitation and denial.
Come browse these mountains,
it says, mark the few homes
and wonder how this place
got started, got named,
survives. But don't stay.
Don't hope for a fill-up
or the burgers you haven't had
since Vegas. Just pass on by
and know what can never be yours,
and dream tonight you could stay
and grow old with the mountains.  

Meet JON SEBBA of Valley Winds Chapter

 JON SEBBA has been a UTSPS member on and off since 1997. In 2013 his poetry collection entitled Yossi, Yasser & Other Soldiers was chosen as UTSPS Book of the Year. He tells us…that book prompted by my combat experience in 1967, has given me a new mission in life. I use it to show vets and others survivors of trauma how writing and poetry in particular can help calm the stormy waters of our memories. Jon has recently taken over as chair of the Valley Winds Chapter of UTSPS from Steven Leitch who is our new State UTSPS President. Since Jon spends his winters in Arizona, he is hoping to set up his chapter with virtual meetings which may be the way to go for us during the current pandemic.

 A retired design engineer he loves fishing in the beautiful lakes east of SLC, fishing and writing poetry. He feels that…I have learned much and my poetry has improved thanks to the help and kind critiques of my friends at UTSPS. If one is a good observer, one can find poems anywhere, or more accurately everywhere. This one was hanging out at sunset, near a bridge on the Provo River as it enters Jordanelle Reservoir:

Arcs by Jon Sebba

 Above the splash and ripple damsel-nymphs

dance in sepia tones, dragonflies hesitate

in and out of spider silk traces

dangling from dusty bones

of a rusty bridge arch over the low sun.

 

A lone youth, knee-deep in a pale-beer current,

twitches the rod in his hand,

sends a sunlit spark along a loop

in a wide oval arc that settles on water,

light-as-a-fly.

 

Like a conductor at the philharmonic,

he swings his arm back.          Twist-flick,

the point of light vaults higher and wider,

streaks from hand to hook,

kisses the wet surface

and lingers like a feather for a beat.

 

Suddenly, a spring rainbow

explodes in a splash. 

Vees radiate from the line

 

and race away.

 

He pants and wrestles,

trout twists and turns,

rod bends and bows.

The line sings out. 

 

The rod and reel play until the tired fish concedes.

He draws her to him, cradles the rainbow in water,

eases hook out of her jaw, 

 

admires her sleek lines,

 

then opens his hands. She gives

a tail-flip and smack that sound like, Thank you.

You’re welcome, he murmurs and sighs.