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Poet Laureate Report 2017-2018
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notebook-2247352_1920For reasons that I cannot explain, the Poet Laureate gives his or her annual report to the Livermore City Council in February. (I was installed at the end of June 2017.) So last week I compiled a massive spreadsheet of my activities and presented it to the City Council. I couldn’t believe how much work I’d done.

Okay, maybe I could.

In case you, like most people, wonder what a Poet Laureate does, I’m including the summary here.

In the eight months since I was installed as Poet Laureate, I have:

  • Hosted 9 open mics plus 3 additional poetry events summarizes below.
  • Held a reading at the Civic Center Library called Meet the Poet Laureate. I read selected poems from my chapbook along with new work, and answered questions about my goals as Poet Laureate.
  • Curated an hour of classic and contemporary cowboy poetry for a community event held by the Livermore Heritage Guild at Hagemann Ranch. It proved extremely popular, so I’ll be doing it again this summer.
  • After six months negotiating with LARPD, I found a compromise so we could continue the Ravenswood Poetry Series. The 1st event, held January 21st, was a Tri-Valley Poetry Showcase featuring seven local poets plus myself. It was well-attended and well-received. Future events at Ravenswood will be held on the following Sundays: April 22, July 22, and October 28th from 5 to 7 pm. I’ll be announcing the featured poets for the April event soon.
  • IMG_5136Held 4 Teen Poet of the Month contests, with 3 more slated for this spring plus a public reading for the winning teens and honorable mentions scheduled for late May.
  • Received a mini grant from the Livermore Commission for the Arts so I could expand Poetry in a Test Tube: Livermore’s 2nd Annual Science Poetry Contest. We now offer cash prizes in 3 divisions: Youth (K-8th), Teen (high school), and Adult. Deadline for submissions is March 10th. The award ceremony will occur on Sunday, March 18th.
  • Wrote the poem, “A Place to Call Home,” for my swearing-in last June as well as the poem, “Eulogy for the Old Library, 1966-2004/2018,” for the recent ground breaking ceremony (and demolition).
  • I’m currently working on a poem for the Livermore Civic Center Library, as well as another dealing with autism. These will be read at Audacious April—an event celebrating National Poetry Month, Autism Awareness Month, and National Library Week.
  • I was selected to serve as Poetry Judge at the Alameda County Fair. On Saturday, June 23rd, I’ll be hosting a reading and teaching a free poetry workshop.
  • Represented the City at literary events in San Jose, Pleasant Hill, Oakland, and San Francisco.

There’s more juicy stuff waiting in the wings, but I’ll save that for later when I have more details.

In short, it’s been a busy eight months, and I expect the rest of my term to be just as full. And that’s a good thing because it means I’m spreading the joy of poetry and prose far and wide. I’m grateful that I took the plunge.

Until next time,
Cynthia

Tomorrow I’m Reading at the Livermore Library
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Tomorrow I will be reading at the Civic Center Library in Livermore, California as part of the Library’s Friends, Authors, and Arts Series. The event is called An Evening with the New Poet Laureate and will take place from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The Civic Center Library is located at 1188 South Livermore Avenue, Livermore, CA 94550.

I will be reading selected poems from my chapbook, Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism (Finishing Line Press, 2016), as well as some new work. There will be time for questions after the reading. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Flyer.CynthiaPatton.AcrossanAqueousMoon

As always, it’s an honor to have my work featured, but particularly nice to have it happen in my community.

If you are in the area, please plan to attend.

Until next time,
Cynthia

Reading at Livermore Library in Two Weeks!
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In two weeks, I will be reading at the Civic Center Library in Livermore California as part of the Library’s Friends, Authors, and Arts Series. The event is called An Evening with the New Poet Laureate and will be held on Thursday, October 19, 2017 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The Civic Center Library is located at 1188 South Livermore Avenue, Livermore, CA 94550.

I will be reading selected poems from my chapbook, Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism (Finishing Line Press, 2016), as well as some new work. There will be ample time for questions after the reading. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Flyer.CynthiaPatton.AcrossanAqueousMoon

As always, it’s an honor to have my work featured, but particularly nice to have it happen in my community.

If you are in the area, please plan to attend.

Until next time,
Cynthia

Reading at Livermore Civic Center Library
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I’m excited to announce that I will be reading at the Civic Center Library in Livermore California as part of the Library’s Friends, Authors, and Arts Series. The event is called An Evening with the New Poet Laureate and will be held on Thursday, October 19, 2017 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. I will be reading selected poems from my book, Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism (Finishing Line Press, 2016), as well as new work. There will be time for questions after the reading. Books will be available for purchase.

Flyer.CynthiaPatton.AcrossanAqueousMoon

As always, it’s an honor to have my work featured, but particularly nice to have it happen in my community.

If you are in the area, please plan to attend.

Until next time,
Cynthia

It’s Official! I’m Poet Laureate
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fountain-pen-1851096_1920On Monday, June 26th, I was sworn in as the City of Livermore’s fourth Poet Laureate. The Commission for the Arts notified me of its selection a few weeks ago, but I wanted to wait to make the announcement until the appointment was official. Well, it’s official. My term starts on July 1, 2017, and lasts two years (with a possibility of a two-year extension).

To kick off my first week, I read my first official poem to the City Council, hosted the Whistlestop Writers Open Mic, now in it’s fourth year, and on Sunday, July 2nd, will host a cowboy poetry event at the Heritage Guild’s community open house at historic Hagemann Ranch, located at 455 Olivina Avenue in Livermore. I’ll be showcasing poems from two local poets: Lynn R. Owens (Livermore’s “Poet Lariat,” now deceased) and Lauren DeVore, who owns a ranch on Morgan Territory Road. Plus I’ve collected some fantastic examples of classic and contemporary cowboy poetry, including a fair number of female poets!

The poetry readings will be split into two 30-minute segments: one at 3:00 p.m. and the other at 4:00 p.m. The event runs from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., and will include a 4-H horsemanship demonstration, square dancing, glass blowing, antique farm equipment, presentations by local ranchers, games for kids, the El Ranchero Vaquero Team (Mexican horse dancing) at 1:15 p.m. and 2:45 p.m., plus free food!

It’s going to be an exciting and fun event, and I’m happy I could help out my dear friend Barbara Soules and the Heritage Guild. Barbara is already planning to make this an annual event! I hope you can join me.

For those of you that missed my first official poem, here’s what I read to the Livermore City Council on Monday night after I was sworn in.

 

A PLACE TO CALL HOME

 Live-No-More-in-Livermore.
That’s what we used to say as bored
high school students eager to escape.
It was different then: no hip restaurants,
no outlet stores, no wine bars,
or even coffee shops. We bucked

hay in the quad for Homecoming.
I dreamt of a fast-paced career paired
with big city lights, far from a sleepy
hometown. I got them—for awhile—
but by thirty I found myself, inexplicably,
here, in the one place I’d sworn to avoid.

 Live-No-More-in-Livermore.
Which changed more, the place or I?
The Vine serves wine; we have fireworks
downtown. The cowboy bar is gone, replaced
by yoga studios, French bakeries, craft beer.
Now when I climb Pigeon Pass at night,

see the Valley cupped like a sea of stars
in the Earth’s hands, I feel blessed. I hike
Brushy Peak in the shadow of windmills,
mark seasons with vineyards. I pass
Baughman’s and the Donut Wheel, feel
something twist in my head-strong heart.

 Live-No-More-in-Livermore.
For both the place and I, things were lost
in the passage of time, but much was gained.
The roots I once sought to sever sink deeper,
drawing me close, weaving a cloak
that shelters in life’s inevitable storms.

 Livermore—it’s good to be home.

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For the next few weeks, I’ll be talking to key constituents, making plans, and settling into my new role. If this first week is any indication, it’s going to be a busy two years!

What new tasks are you tackling this summer?

Until next time,
Cynthia

Second Guest Post on A Writer’s March
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This year, in addition to participating in A Writer’s March, I contributed two guest posts. Here is the second of my posts: Fallow Fields

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The writers who have participated in A Writer’s March over the years are an amazing bunch. I’m honored to be a part of this inspiring crowd and grateful that I could help with the blog.  Go check it out!

Until next time,
Cynthia

Poetry in a Test Tube
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Isaac_NewtonKevin Gunn, the current Poet Laureate of Livermore, decided last month he wanted to celebrate science before his term expired. So he created a contest called Poetry in a Test Tube. It was open to any resident regardless of age. He wasn’t sure how many people would enter, and because I know how it feels to sit at an open mic with only a few people in attendance, I wrote a science poem and sent it in.

Originally I planned to do a poem about Albert Einstein because he was Swiss like my grandparents, but as I conducted my research, I was increasingly distracted by Sir Isaac Newton. Eventually I wrote a poem about him instead.

It turns out Newton many have suffered from bipolar disorder and also could have been on the autism spectrum. Yet he made countless scientific discoveries until his death at age 84. He developed calculus and didn’t consider it important! Just a convenient way for him to think numerically. In short, the man was pretty freaking amazing.

Here’s the poem I entered:

 SIR ISAAC NEWTON, 1642-1726

Calculus, optics, laws of motion,
the first estimate of the speed of sound.
So many discoveries buried like seeds
in a premature infant, waiting to root
in a mind’s fertile soil, waiting for
the spark that would ignite the world.

Prisms, physics, universal gravitation,
color spectrums and reflecting telescopes.
Did he know he was brilliant? Taste
the sweet mead of genius as he untangled
thorny knots? Or was it craving, an obsession
to discover what others never dreamed?

He marveled at the night sky, saw sequenced
equations sailing through stars, watched
an apple fall, and in its descent found gravity.
He calculated trajectories of comets, the push
and pull of tides, composed in furious formulae,
made melodies of math and motion.

For eight decades he swam in the ocean
of knowledge, rode tidal waves of euphoria,
fought undertows of despair, struggled with
conversation, never savored love nor friendship.
Some might call this failure, but I see imperfect
perfection, the most human trait of all.

The numbers sang arias as he crafted infinite
theories, ordering the universe with metered
precision. Was the music enough to fill
his life? Three hundred fifty years later,
its transcendent tune flows through ours—
a scientific refrain echoed around the globe.

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Kevin had over 30 entries in the first-ever science poetry contest. Last weekend, he held a reading and the poems were terrific. (There was a seven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old—both girls—who knocked it out of the park.) They announced the winners, and my poem was selected for first prize! I was grateful and pleased—who wouldn’t be?—and really, really surprised.

Nate, however, shrugged and said, “I knew you’d win.”

My daughter listened to the poem, then asked me to turn on the music.

I hope this contest becomes an annual tradition.

Until next time,
Cynthia

Guest Post on A Writer’s March
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This year, in addition to participating in A Writer’s March, I’m doing two guest posts. I’ve joked with friends for years that writing is much like online dating. Well, A Writer’s March founder Samantha Tetangco challenged me to prove it in an essay. So here’s my post: If At First You Don’t Succeed: How Writing Resembles Dating

ONLINE DATING

The writers who have contributed over the years to A Writer’s March are an amazing bunch. I’m honored to be a part of this inspiring group and thrilled to be helping with the blog.  Go check it out!

Until next time,
Cynthia

Tomorrow I’m Reading at the Valona Deli Poetry Series
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Tomorrow I, along with Kirston Koths, will be featured at the Valona Deli Poetry Series. I’ll be reading from my debut poetry collection, Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism.  The event takes place from 3 to 5 p.m. in funky Crockett, California. An open mic will follow the featured readers.

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It’s an honor to have my work selected for this long-running poetry series, which is hosted by Connie Post.

If you are in the area, please plan to attend.

Until next time,
Cynthia

Featured Reader at the Valona Deli Poetry Series
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I’m excited to announce that my debut poetry collection, Across An Aqueous Moon: Travels in Autism, will be featured at the Valona Deli Poetry Series on Sunday, January 8, 2017.  The event takes place from 3 to 5 p.m. in funky Crockett, California. Kirston Koths and I will be the featured poets, followed by an open mic.

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It’s an honor to have my work selected for this long-running poetry series, which is hosted by my friend and fellow autism mom, Connie Post.

If you are in the area, please plan to attend.

Until next time,
Cynthia

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