Cartwheels on the Sky

Cartwheels on the Sky features Gualala Poet Dana Teen Lomax. Dana is fourth-generation  Californian, who has lived on the southern Mendocino Coast for nearly  three years. She currently serves as the 2021-2022 Poet-in-Residence at  the Gualala Arts Center.

The  daughter of a painter and a builder, Lomax began writing poetry as a  child and remembers melting crayons in her bedroom and drawing poems  around the swirls of color as a way of dealing with her parents’  divorce. Early on, she knew that language had the ability to help people  understand experience, help us sort, uncover, and/or complicate how we  see the world. In high school, she borrowed a copy of e.e. cumming’s  selected poems at the local library, and the possibilities on the page  shifted tremendously for her. Lomax began to see poetry as a deep  conversation with form, with the reader, with ways of directing  experience and connecting with others in intimate ways.

A  lecturer at San Francisco State University for over two decades, Lomax  has taught writing in schools, prisons, libraries, hospitals, pubs, and  farmers’ markets. She served as the Director of Small Press Traffic, the  Human Rights and Equity Chair for her teacher’s union, and as a  traveling poet-teacher with the Performing Arts Workshop, the William  James Association, and California Poets in the Schools.

To  date, Lomax has published three large scale editorial projects and  three books of poetry as well as numerous other chapbooks, broadsides,  and discreet poems. Her most recent anthology includes work from every  US state, district, territory, and commonwealth and is entitled THE BEAUTIFUL: Poets Reimagine a Nation, published by Gualala Arts Center. Lomax also edited Kindergarde: Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children which  received a Creative Work Fund Grant as well as the Lion and Unicorn  Award for Excellence in North American Literature from John Hopkins  University Press. High points in Lomax’s career include when her book, Disclosure,  was chosen by the Guerilla Girls as one of their favorite poetry books  of the year, and the broadside printing of her poem “Lullaby” by Arion  Press in San Francisco.

Her current project, -unnamed-relation-,  considers the links and jumps between ideas, people, and ourselves in  the world. Poems from this manuscript have been published in the American Poetry Review, The Elderly, and The Pi Review, among others. She is also working on completing  a graphic novel with a former middle school student, Peyton Alexander,  making poem-films, writing a musical with her identical twin sister, and  completing a short documentary about inequity in California’s education  system.

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Originally aired 7-7:30pm, Saturday, July 2 at 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. Also streams live at https://kgua.org

This month's Cartwheels on the Sky  celebrates  the successful end of the 2021-22 school year with a show featuring the  literary voices of K-8 students at Manchester Elementary School in  Manchester, CA. The last school year has not been without its ups and downs, so 5th grader Max and his fellow students came to me with the idea to close the school year on an especially high note. The show will air on KZYX&Z 90.7FM Philo, 88.1FM Fort Bragg, and 91.5FM Willits, as well as stream live on the web www.kzyx.org.

This  year Manchester Elementary School participated in Student Led Projects  (SLED,) as part of Prosolve's Nationwide education program. SLED is a  national network of student chapters focused on identifying civic issues  in their community and implementing sustainable solutions for  improvement. With support from national Trail Guides and their classroom  SLED Advisor, students in grades 3rd through 8th formed leadership teams and designed projects for school improvement.

The  Sled team projects included replacing a playground structure that had  broken, creating a school leadership and spirit team, rehabilitating our  woodland that has been devastated by tree die off, and recruiting  volunteers to lead enrichment workshops. The teams have held fundraisers  throughout the year to finance the play-structure and woodland project.  Many thanks to the community for amazing support at the student’s  tamale sale, bake sale and lap-a-thon!

Currently  the students have been preparing for a "Read-a-thon Fundraiser." The  Manchester school students wrote poems and were recorded reading them.  Proceeds from the fundraiser will fund Student Led Projects (SLED.)

To donate to the fundraiser drop off or mail your contribution:

In person:

Manchester Elementary School

Tune in and hear the kids read their poems!!

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Originally aired 7-7:30pm, Saturday, June 4 at 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. Also streams live at https://kgua.org

Cartwheels on the Sky features Elk poet, filmmaker, fiction writer and teacher Thomas Roberdeau.

Thomas Roberdeau is a filmmaker and writer living in Elk, and has been living on the the Mendocino coast on and off since the late 1970’s.

He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin. His work in film has been primarily seen on the History Channel and on PBS.  His films and screenplays have won several prestigious awards.

He is a teacher who has taught in most Northcoast schools, in Santa Monica, with California Poets-in-the-Schools, and he has lectured on film at various universities. He currently teaches with San Francisco Art & Film, a private school in the Bay Area.

He has won several grants, including one in film from the National Endowment for the Arts and a teaching grant from the California Arts Council.

He has published a book with Sun & Moon Press in Los Angeles, and a variety of poems and stories with every literary journal on the Northcoast. Read some of Roberdeau’s writings at: https://hollywooddementia.com/author/thomas-roberdeau/

Originally aired on Saturday, April 2 at 88.3, on KGUA FM Gualala;  https://kgua.org

Originally airing on Saturday, March 5, 2022 from 7-7:30 on KGUA FM Gualala, this episode Cartwheels on the Sky features the poems and process of SF Poet Diane Frank.

Diane is author of eight books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems was published in 2021 by Glass Lyre Press. She is also editor of two bestselling anthologies: Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here and Pandemic Puzzle Poems.  Diane lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she dances, plays  cello in the Golden Gate Symphony, and creates her life as an art form. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  More info on Diane at:  www.dianefrank.net

Originally airing on February 5, 2022 from 7-7:30 on KGUA FM Gualala, this episode Cartwheels on the Sky features the poems and process of Marin County Poet Kathy Evans.

Kathy is the author of four collections of poetry: Imagination Comes to Breakfast, Hunger and Sorrow (which won the Small Press Poetry Prize), As The Heart is Held, and now her latest book, nominated for a Pen award, Trespassers Welcome.

A  BA from Northwestern University and an MA from San Francisco State  University, Kathy has taught creative writing with The California Poets  in the Schools, Marin County Juvenile Hall, and the College of Marin.  She also taught composition and essay at the University of San  Francisco, and was poet-in-residence at The Headlands Center of the Arts  and at Bennioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland and San Francisco. In  addition, she is a graphic recorder for various corporate and non-profit  organizations.

She  loves teaching poetry as much as she loves reading and writing it,  believing that is a privilege to see revealed the imagination and  feelings of a child. She has an essay forthcoming from University of  Iowa Press, entitled “Read Between the Lines. In her spare time she  loves to swim laps. She lives in San Rafael, California, by the library.

This episode of Cartwheels on the Sky features the poems and process of Vallejo poet Jeffrey Kingman.

Jeffrey Kingman lives by the Napa River in Vallejo, California.

Janet  DeBar began reading and writing poetry during her childhood in Beech  Bottom, West Virginia. She studied English Lit at the college of Wooster  in Ohio and at Stanford University but she often said that she hoped  that these experiences did not make a lasting impact on her poetry. She  began reading her poems to audiences when she moved to the North Coast  over two decades ago. Her work appears in Wood, Water, Air and Fire, the  Anthology of Mendocino Women Poets, and she was delighted to have been  included with ruth weiss and the Checkered Demon in the Café Review.  Also a musician, Janet played didjeridu with Cloudfire many times along  the Mendonoma coast.

This show originally aired from 7-7:30pm, Saturday, October 2 at 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. 

Dan Langton was a longtime Creative Writing Professor at San Francisco State  University. He arrived in SF during the burgeoning beat movement, and he  held a poetry gathering (he hates the word “salon”) in San Francisco in  the Haight-Ashbury that was legendary, and to this day, he is loved by  so many poets and renowned as an important mentor for a new generation  of poets.

Daniel Langton has  won national and international prizes in England, Ireland, and the  United States, including the coveted Devins Award for Poetry in 1967. He  has a PhD from UC Berkeley and he taught in the Creative Writing and  English Departments at SF State University for 50 years.

He  will be 94 in September, and by all accounts, he is, right now, turning  out some of the best work of his life. “I’m an old man in a hurry!” he  shouts as he types away at his battered old Royal. Puzzling out rhyme  schemes is what keeps him alive, well into his dotage. Or, as he calls  it, “my anec-dotage.”

Here is an excerpt from an open letter he wrote to the SF State faculty the day he retired at 90:

I have often felt I was living near history rather than in it.

My  father was in the Irish Republican Army and had to run for his life, my  wife is a German Jew and had to run for her life, I was in the squadron  (but not the planes) that dropped Fat Man and Little Boy, our niece was  murdered on 9/11.

I  have lived in four neighborhoods in my life, mostly by happenstance. I  grew up in Harlem, moved to the Village, from there to Rive Gauche,  wound up in the Haight-Ashbury. I am not the reason all four are  world-famous.

As  I said, I was middle-aged before I stood in front of a class. I also  said I had had a variety of jobs, I didn’t say I was good at them, or  happy with them.

But  with teaching I came alive. There is no other way to say it. The  kindness, the sweetness, I dare to say love, were there from the  beginning. The writers I knew and know, but especially the ones for whom  we can now put together a Complete Works. And the students who listened  to me and went into teaching. With (always) my last words to them:  After all, there are few ways to live an honorable life.

And more in Dan’s words: My  father’s father and my father both published poetry in Ireland, at a  time when there were few readers, let alone writers. My father gave up a  rural heaven for the frightening hell of New York City, so his sons and  daughters would have a chance. They took that chance. What  followed for me was fifty years of teaching, seven books, friendships  with poets, San Francisco — the town poets live for — and a wife I would  not have met otherwise.

On  Saturday, August 7, 2021 Cartwheels on the Sky (always the  first Saturday of the month) featured the poems and process of Northern California poet and best selling author Susan Wooldridge.

Susan has held workshops on creative language and process with thousands of adults and children. Her book poemcrazy:  freeing your life with words is  now in a 32nd printing. Anne Lamott wrote, “This is a wonderful  book—smart, wide-eyed, joyful, helpful, inspiring. You’re going to love  it, and love writing poetry more for having read it.” Recently poemcrazy  was number 7 on a Penguin/Random House list of the 28 best books on  writing.

This show aired live on Saturday, August 7 at 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. Also streams live at https://kgua.org

This episode of Cartwheels on the Sky features the poems and process of Mendocino Coast poet Gordon Black.

Born in Detroit, Black is a second generation, of Polish background,  American. His father was a firefighter, later Battalion Chief, and his  mother a social worker and theater director in stage and radio  productions, and in his words he “was expected to succeed!”

He says he stumbled out of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan with  an M.A. in philosophy and pointed advice to go “get a job”.

“It took decades and luck to turn that degree into some steady bread and  water, and I have been a happy adjunct as a professor in philosophy at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC),” says Black.

He arrived on the Mendocino Coast in 1972 and engaged with the nascent  poetry community and turned from extended prose efforts to “the stand up  / sit down of completed poems, written and rewritten until the  creatures fly without further assistance.” He has been doing live radio  during much of that time, programming classical music for KZYX,  Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, and has been involved in the  annual Mendocino Spring Poetry Celebration for sixteen consecutive  years.

“I owe my own development in poetry to all my fellows in the regional scene, so I try to help keep it going,” credits Black.

This podcast aired live on Saturday, June 5, 2021 on 88.3, KGUA FM Gualala. 

and this is Gordon’s “page” poem as referenced in the show:

LACONIC TOWEL

Gordon Black