By Laura Grimes
I said hello and called her name. She sat on the side of her twin bed, reading an aged book. She didn’t respond. I called her name again. I stood in front of her for several moments. I raised my voice. Nothing. I finally stooped down and looked into her face.
Josephine raised her [...]
On Saturday night Mr. and Mrs. Scatter went down to the industrial east Willamette waterfront, to Waterbrook Studio, the little theater-in-a-warehouse just north of the Broadway Bridge, to catch Poetry Off the Page.
It’s the latest in Eric Hull’s Vox series of staged — I almost want to say composed — poetry readings. Composed, because it’s [...]
I’ve been keeping someone to myself much too long. I’ve collected reams of notes and have a stack of material. Now I feel somewhat prodded, thanks to Rose City Reader, who posted this review of Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.”
I left this comment on her post:
My copy of this book first [...]
Mrs. Scatter posted in Parenting 101 how she constantly looks for opportunities to impart valuable life lessons on the Large Smelly Boys.
As Mr. Scatter noted in a recent post, The Scatter Family has been on the road. Longtime Scatter friends know that when the family travels in the Large Smelly Boymobile they [...]
Mrs. Scatter takes her ever-loving Mom Job seriously, constantly looking for opportunities to impart valuable life lessons on the Large Smelly Boys. They are still at a tender age when they’re vulnerable and impressionable, so she takes great care in modeling supreme mature behavior. She takes this job so seriously, in [...]
Mr. Scatter has been a writing fool lately, and not all of it for the virtual pages of this illustrious blog.
He has also composed essays that resulted in actual financial recompense, including a trio of pieces for that fine and noble stalwart of legacy media, The Oregonian.
This piece, about Oregon’s search for a new poet [...]
My paternal grandmother’s name was Lizzie Lou Willingham. Not Elizabeth Louise. Lizzie Lou.
Lizzie Lou married Virgil Homer Hicks, a man whose naming signaled a certain familial aspiration. One of their offspring, my father, is named Irby Hicks. No middle name, and a first name that was a family surname. (Another of their children, my father’s [...]
Today in Scatterville we’re taken with Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times of Tony Hoagland’s new book of poetry, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.
For one thing, that’s just a terrific title, even better than the review’s zinger of a headline (based on a quoted poem set in a grocery store), The [...]
“We have some exciting poetry news!”
Press releases starting like that don’t hit the central clearing desk at Art Scatter World Headquarters very often, so of course we dropped everything else and immediately investigated. We’ve been waiting for some exciting poetry news ever since the cat lost his hat.
What is this big news? Poetry in Motion [...]
This morning I discovered that the venerable (blogospherically speaking) PDX Writer Daily has closed shop and many of its perpetrators have begun a magazine, Propeller.
A project of the Portland State University Writing Center, PDX Writer Daily had taken a long summer sabbatical that stretched into fall, and so I hadn’t checked it in a while.
The [...]