Poets are an odd bunch. Alike clowns, many people fear them. Twisting words like so many balloons, until the squeaking becomes intolerable. But to some, poetry is a graceful spiritual thing, a gateway to introspection, or to others, a reason to throw down the gauntlet and fight bare-knuckled against Death itself! Or Jim, with a whim, that’s him.
In its fourth year as a local literary enclave, Sandra Anfang’s “Rivertown Poets Amusing-Mondays” reader series explores those themes and more, with a steady stream from ‘conscious poets’ to conspicuous cornballs.
For National Poetry Month 2018, Anfang brings together an unlikely combination of poetic personages, John Dooley and Melissa Hobbs.
WHO: John Dooley, Melissa Hobbs
WHAT: Two feature poets, +open mic
WHEN: Monday, April 2. 6:15-8:30
WHERE: Aqus Café Foundry Warf, 189 H Street, Petaluma, CA 94952
707-778-6060
John Dooley is a Portland poet & writer, retired poetry slammer (three years on the Portland Nationals team), and former columnist and features writer for The Portland Mercury and other regional and national publications. He has recorded six full-length spoken-word albums with Hydropods. @MidnightHashtag Warrior.
John's albums Oral Foibles (available now), and Oral Foibles II – The Jackening (available in April) are on Amazon, Billboard Music, Apple Music, and iTunes. His work has appeared on Indiefeed Performance Poetry, RC Weslowski’s Oh No Not Another Podcast, on KHSU, KBOO, KMHD, and Poetica - ABC Australia. You can learn more about him at JohnDooleyOralFoibles.com
Melissa Hobbs earned a BA from Kent State University in Ohio. She’s an idealist who worked one of her lifetimes in insurance for the State of California. She would like to see the dream of a blue-green earth climb up from the enlightened horizon, but for now, she pursues writing in the San Francisco Bay area. She has a new poetry collection, Under the Pomegranate Sun. Birds, meditation, and service to refugee children fill up her five-gallon bucket, which overflows with narratives and lyrical worlds, which eventually become poems and stories.