Mark Thalman at William Stafford Birthday Celebration at Linfield College

Mark Thalman

Mark Thalman was one of the featured poets at the 2012 William Stafford Birthday Celebration in Nicholson Library at Linfield College.

Mark Thalman's poetry has been widely published in small presses, college reviews, anthologies, and e-zines for almost four decades.   He is the author of Catching The Limit , which is available from his website.    
Thalman has been a Poet-in-the-Schools  for the Oregon Arts Commission, an Assistant Poetry Editor for the Northwest Review, and a board member of the Portland Poetry Festival.  He has also been an instructor for Chemeketa Community College.  He is the editor of Poetry.us.com 

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The one hour Meadowlake Studios Encounter of the William Stafford Birthday Celebration will air on McMinnville Community Media

History and Donald Duck, taxes and spending

History is interesting. 1943 and here we are 2012. What a difference 69 years makes. War, Taxes, Saving, Spending.

I like the line "for it is our taxes that run the factories" It is wild - spending bad - taxes good. Now it is taxes bad - spending good. oh well.

Donald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Taxes (1943)(from Open Culture)

During World War II, some of the greatest living filmmakers put aside their commercial aspirations and directed propaganda films for the Allies. Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Huston – they all made a cinematic contribution to the war effort. (More on that here.) And so did Walt Disney, big time. 90% of Disney employees produced propaganda films for the American government, creating 68 hours of continuous film, including this short film for the Treasury Department. The Spirit of ’43 puts Donald Duck in the always unenviable position of asking Americans to pay high taxes to fund their wars. (Imagine doing that today!)

Barbara LaMorticella at William Stafford Birthday Celebration at Linfield College

Barbara LaMorticella was one of the featured poets at the 2012 William Stafford Birthday Celebration at the Nicholson Library at Linfield College.

Barbara LaMorticella lives in a cabin in the woods outside Portland, Oregon.   In 1997, her second collection of poems, Rain on Waterless Mountain, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.  In 1999 she received an Oregon Literary Fellowship in poetry for women writers.    She has edited or co-edited three collections of Portland poetry including Portland Lights in 2000.

In 2005, Barbara was awarded the  Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award by Literary Arts, an award in recognition of significant contributions that have enriched Oregon’s literary community.

Her work is in many anthologies,  most recently To Topos Poetry International: Poverty and Poetry, (Oregon State University,  2008), Not A Muse (Haven Books 2009   Not a Muse, (Haven Books, 2009), and Eating the Pure Light (Blackwater Press 2009 , an anthology of the inner lives of women .  She's been featured at Bumbershoot , Seattle's Music and Arts Festival, where she won a Bumbershoot Big Book Award. In addition, Barbara was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize , has had her work featured as part of  Poetry in Motion.  She is a long time co-host with Walt Curtis of KBOO-FM radio’s Talking Earth.

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The one hour Meadowlake Studios Encounter of the 2012 William Stafford Birthday Celebration will air on McMinnville Community Media .

Creative process in glass & video

Out in the studio as I trimmed through the bottom of a bowl, I started thinking about fused glass.  Bottomless bowls can be great glass molds.  Then I went to Writing Without Paper blog and, as usual, found inspiration in both video and glass.

Videographer Karen Rodriguez in 2009 produced a video for Corning Museum of Glass  introduces Artist-In-Residency glass sculptor Mielle Riggie.  She explains the technique of cast-glass sculpture and gives a wonderful insight into her creative process.

Mielle Riggie works with both the strength and fragility of glass to illustrate the dynamics of human emotion or conditions. In her residency at The Studio, Riggie created cast-glass sculpture amplifying elements in nature, such as leaves or roots, and recombined disparate parts in ways that exaggerated the tension and balance of humans with their surroundings.

In 2010 Riggie had an exhibition at the Winston Wachter Fine Art  in Seattle which provides some dramatic images of her sculptures. It is worth a visit. 



We do these artist interviews videos.  Karen Rodriquez's video does a great job of presenting an artist as they talk about how they work.

Jakob Gowell at William Stafford Birthday Celebration at Linfield College

Jakob Gowell

It is traditional at the William Stafford Birthday Celebration to invite members of the audience to present a poem by William Stafford and to read a poem of their own.

Jakob Gowell recently graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa.  He talked about reading letters from his grandfather and discovering and connecting with his grandfather who he never knew. He recited two poems,  William Stafford's poem "Traveling In The Dark" and a poem by Edna St Vincent Mellay "Conscientious Objector" . He read a poem of his own.

His recital of the poems was easy and natural, in keeping with the William Stafford approach.

The one hour Meadowlake Studios Encounter of the William Stafford Celegration will air on McMinnville Community Media

William Stafford, a compeling voice

William Stafford

We filmed the 2012 William Stafford Birthday Celebration at Linfield College.  After putting an hour TV show together for McMinnville Community Media I separated the individual poets presentations, which I have been posting on our YouTube channel and here. 

Before the event I was reading Stafford's "The Darkness Around Us Is Deep".  After the Celebration I wanted to find out if I could hear and see William Stafford.  Yes the The Friends Of William Stafford website has poems and video clips of him.   The poem Farm on the Great Plains is a wonderful video clip of Stafford reading.  His voice is quiet, compelling. 

There are videos of Stafford from Poetry Videos but they cost more than I can afford at the moment.


Here in Oregon, the Friends of William Stafford are committed and have been celebrating his birthday (January 17, 1914) with poetry readings throughout the month of January for many years.    Born in Kansas, William Stafford, Kansas poet, he is also claimed by Kansas as a native son. 

Stafford taught writing at Lewis and Clark College for 30 years.  He published over 50 volumes of poetry.  "He kept a daily journal for 50 years, and composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published." (Wikipedia - William Stafford (poet))  He wrote "Writing the Australian Crawl" about the craft of writing poetry.  I haven't read it, but now I'm out to find a copy.

There are many, many Stafford poems across the internet, too many to try and list websites, at this time.  Maybe for a later project.

Joanna Rose at William Stafford Birthday Celebration at Linfield College

Joanna Rose

Joanna Rose was one of the featured poets at the 2012 William Stafford Birthday Celebration in Nicholson Library at Linfield College

   She is the author of "Little Miss Strange" (Touchstone 1998), winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Fiction.

Her poetry and prose has appeared in, Windfall A Journal of Poetry of Place, The Bellingham Review, Marco Polo Quarterly, ZYZZYVA , Gobshite Quaterly , High Desert Journal.

Joanna Rose contributes poetry to the Oregonian book section  and often reviews books for the Oregonian.  She is part of The Pinewood Table critique group, which has a Facebook presence.  She teaches writing and goes into the schools around Oregon and Washington.

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Joanna Rose read William Stafford poems and a poem of her own.  The one hour Meadowlake Studios Encounter of the Stafford Celebration will air on McMinnville Community Media