AlamogordoTownNews.com Alamogordo's Otero Arts Hosts Joan Logghe Oct 21st, 6 pm - A Life of Poetry from La Puebla NM

FREE public event! Meet the poet, Joan Logghe
and enjoy the performance at Otero Artspace, 1118 Indiana Avenue, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 88310 October 21st, 6 pm

Biography of Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate 2010-2012

Joan Logghe was Poet Laureate of Santa Fe 2010-2012. She works at poetry and arts activism in community, off the academic grid in La Puebla, New Mexico. She and her husband, Michael, raised three children and have three grandchildren. She studied at Tufts University where she graduated as Class Poet and won an Academy of American Poet’s College Poetry Award. Joan began a life in poetry by volunteering at her children’s school thirty years ago and has worked with children and youth as well as adults, ever since.

Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Grants, A Mabel Dodge Luhan Internship, and a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant. Her teaching life has included Ghost Ranch Abiquiu, University of New Mexico-Los Alamos, Santa Fe Community College, Artworks, Santa Fe Girls’ School, CultureNet’s Poets-in-the-Schools, and Santa Clara Pueblo Day School. She taught poetry in Bratislava, Vienna, and Zagreb, Croatia in 2004. For 13 years, she has served as Poet-in-Residence at Santa Fe Girls' School. She is the president of New Mexico Literary Arts which aims to inspire & develop the imaginative use of language and to create opportunities for the integration of the literary arts with other artforms throughout New Mexico.

Her books include What Makes a Woman Beautiful, Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man (a finalist in Western States Book Award), Sofia, Rice, and The Singing Bowl from UNM Press.

With Renée Gregorio, and Miriam Sagan she is a founder of Tres Chicas Books. The Singing Bowl
from UNM press was shortlisted in three books prizes, and Love & Death; Greatest Hits, Tres Chicas Books won a New Mexico Book award.

PoemHolders, a project that emerged while she was Poet Laureate, combine her love of quilts and her secret mission to sneak poetry into everyday life.

A sampling of Poetry by Joan Logghe

Rather

There were birds (bards) lifting

from the saltbush (settlement) like crazy

There was a magpie, was she between

the leaf (hedge) and the fence (window)

There was a night blooming cereus that bloomed twice

and twice, even trying, I missed its opening.

There were a dozen chores and I wanted to do them all at once

There was a birthday on the doorstep and I staggered over it.

There was Thursday in the old house

and they made the word threshold

There were new words in the Oxford English Dictionary,

staycation, ginornmous, frenemy

There were so many beauties (beatniks) falling off your face

There were enough deaths in Haiti (helacious) so we forgot Pakistan

There were people (alligators) who went back to New Orleans

There was your face (your heart) with your eyes closed,

the way you smile best

There was your face for forty years.

There were other faces and after

a death which face remains.

There were clues (crumbs)

and there were giveaways

There was water running

through my body (arroyo).

- Summer 2010

Meet the poet and enjoy the performance at Otero Artspace, 1118 Indiana Avenue, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 88310 October 21st, 6 pm

To learn more or to join the mission of Otero Arts visit: www.oteroarts.org

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