Poetry Night This Wednesday

Bitely poet to read at Newaygo bookery

By Marsha Reeves

Flying Bear Books is honored to host Alan Basting of Bitely as our featured poet for September’s Poetry Night, Wednesday 9/4/19 beginning at 7pm.  Our Poetry Night attendees have been enjoying Alan’s poems for several months, as he has treated us to snippets from his published works. Now he will be the ‘main attraction’ at our September event. One Poetry Night regular said ‘I could listen to Alan’s poems all night!’  Now she will get the chance to do exactly that. 

Home and Away, the newest chapbook of poems from Alan Basting, is his sixth published collection.  The poet and publisher, Christopher Howell, writes, “I have been listening for years to Alan Basting’s calm, wry, affectionate voice telling faithfully the shapes and textures of life as he sees and lives it. The plain, direct language of the poems that voice delivers reminds us what it is like to be awake minute by minute in the world of our being. More importantly, and profoundly, their humor and unaffected humility suggest that we may have available to us a steadier, more capacious happiness than we know.”

Alan Basting was born in Detroit and grew up in Maumee, Ohio.  He attended Earlham College and received his undergraduate degree from University of Cincinnati. Later he earned graduate degrees from Colorado State University and Bowling Green State University. He taught writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati and Owens Community College in Toledo. His chapbooks include Singing from the Abdomen, Stone-Marrow Press; What the Barns Breathe, Windows Press; Suddenly, Herons, The Writers’ Cooperative of Toledo; and Deep Time, Daily Habits and Events, from The Arts Commission of Toledo, Ohio. His collection, Nothing Very Sudden Happens Here, was published by Lynx House Press, Spokane, WA, in late 2013. Poems for the new chapbook, Home and Away, have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry; Birch Gang Review; Walloon Writers Review; Fungi Magazine; Blueline; and Common Ground Review.  He lives in the Manistee National Forest near Bitely, MI. 

More of Alan's story, and poetry from nearly all of his chapbooks, can be found at www.alanbastingpoetry.com 

We acknowledge that Poetry Night is held on the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe People. 

 “Gash Kozin, Niibawin, Giigidoon”. 
( Wake Up.  Stand Up. Speak Up.)

​

---