The Wieden+Kennedy Atrium: Kevin Sampsell belting out,
“You are the unslickest motherfucker I have ever seen,” his words
echoing through the cathedral-high ceiling, bouncing around sparse
arrangements of cement, steel, and wood, and up through 10-or-so rows
of mostly full stadium seating. Sampsell kept the crowd laughing as he
continued reading from “New Suburban Lit,” a poem in eight parts that
jokes about the sterile mythology of suburbia.
Nine other Oregon poets featured in the Burnside Review‘s
Oregon Issue read at W+K last Thursday, August 20. Laton Carter read a
poem about the United State’s largest glacial erratic rock—which
drifted north of Portland during the Ice Age, landing in Yamhill
Valley. Carter recited, “Built into the act of showing is a desire to
be a part, there’s so much left to do,” informing the rock as a symbol
for our planet’s endless environmental permutations.
While Carter wrote about a single item from Oregon’s landscape,
Andrew Michael Roberts wrote about the rain, dreamt of from a bus
bench: “Where ever I am when asleep, the Oregon of my dreams arrives
drenched in this same tenuous light, as if rain is an undiscovered idea
and now this aloneness is my reward, for nothing happening to open my
eyes.” He ends this poem by asking, “Are we always arriving? And if so,
when will we know when we’re there?”
On Sunday, August 30, there’s a second free reading at Rontoms with
more recitations from poets featured in Burnside Review‘s Oregon
Issue.