Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz at Point Arena Community Center

Thursday, May 18 – Michael Riedell

Thursday, June 15 – Mark Sanford Gross

Thursday, July 20 — Thomas Roberdeau

Thursday, August 17 – Patricia Caspers

Thursday, September 21 – Diane Martin 

Thursday, October 19 – Prartho Sereno

Thursday, November 16 – Ethel Mayes

On Thursday, May 18, at 7pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature Ukiah Poet Micheal Riedell. The reading will take place at the Point Arena Community Center at 40 School Street (the former Methodist Church). The reading will begin with live improv jazz, followed by a featured reading with Michael Riedell, then an open mic with jazz improv. The reading will conclude with more live improv jazz and a community jam. All musicians and songwriters welcome to participate in the open jam after the poetry.

Around the third grade Michael Riedell remembers seeing a poem on the chalkboard of his class.  It was a thin poem and short, maybe 12 lines or so, and no doubt it was pithy and rhyming.  But it seemed to say something that mattered the way that poems do.  What it was he doesn’t recall—the vision is blurred—but he knew it was important.

After a lackluster high school performance and then factory jobs, delivery jobs, silk screening jobs and the slow recognition that education might prove valuable, Michael enrolled in his local community college and began to learn to learn.  And he learned to read with joy and wonder and hopefully insight.  Eventually he transferred from his birthplace of east county San Diego to Humboldt State University, and that change, he says, like paths in the woods, made all the difference.

In Humboldt he read constantly, making up for lost time—mostly poetry and mostly not what was assigned for his classes.  He graduated with a degree in English and traveled, living in Alaska and Costa Rica, and then returned to Arcata to get his teaching credential.  Since then he and his wife, Kate, have lived in inland Mendocino County where he has taught high school English and creative writing for over twenty years.

Michael’s first experience reading poetry in public was as a first-place winner in the inaugural ukiaHaiku Festival.  The next year he won two first place awards and later became a member of the festival committee and a judge for the contest.  He has been a featured reader throughout the county and is often heard on KZYX&Z’s Rhythm Running River.  His work has been published locally in Greenfuse, Lighthouse Peddler, North Coast Journal, Ukiah Daily Journal, and Mendocino Arts Magazine.  More broadly his work has appeared in Lilliput Review, Shot Glass Journal, Gravel, Right Hand Pointing, and Clutch, among other literary journals, and in Molly Fisk’s California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology.

Michael is the author of three books of poetry, most recently What We Have Left: Elemental Poems (Slow Mountain Press, 2022).  He served as Ukiah Poet Laureate for 2016-2018 and edited the collection, Deep Valley: Ukiah Poets Laureate 2001-2018.  His one act plays have been produced by the Willits Shakespeare Theatre and Mendocino College.  He currently serves as the host for Ukiah’s long running poetry series, Writers Read, and when the weather is good, he sits in his backyard strumming guitar.

Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, anonymous supporters, and Poets & Writers, Inc.

Habitation

Most places are uninhabitable.

Try living on a bone, you think

I’ll have calcium and can make tools

from slivers of my new land,

a spear, maybe, a ruler.

Like living on a branch, though,

you soon discover you need more

than balance or in the seas

you need more than gills.

Need follows us like a patient stalker.

It’s the low laugh we hear back there

somewhere past the streetlight

where people behind windows

are trying to live in a blue light

that only fills them with more need.

Reduce yourself to a chair, say,

or expand like a balloon

and float above all this.

We need a place to land, a place

to set the chair, to set a table

to eat hopefully in peace, but

peace there is none.

The eye roves, the mind dreams,

feet practice their steps, and we

chant in our silence a mantra

of movement, and hope

that the hill we hike up will roll

down to a new valley

where food and tools and friends

will be in such abundance that

peace will have no choice but

to join us for a meal, for a laugh,

for a lifetime.

This was that valley—

more than once.

This should be that new valley again.

Michael Riedell

Third Thursday Poetry is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, many anonymous donors, and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.