July 20, 2023 — Band of Poets
OUR 200th OFFICIAL READING!
Band of Poets celebrates and explores the intersection of words and music. They’ll read poems over improvised music and sing both original and cover songs. Expect anything from blues to improvised jazz, from soundscapes to new ballads. They evoke poets from the Beats to the Confessionals, from Whitman to Yeats. Band of Poets features the music and poetry of John Burgess, Anna Jenkins, Ted McMahon, Jed Myers, and Rosanne Olson, sometimes joined in performance by other musicians, poets, songwriters, and sometimes even dancers. No two shows are alike except for their exuberance and love.
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John Burgess grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana, taught English in Japan, and now writes and draws in Seattle. His influences include 70s punk, Montana bars, and haiku. He has five books of poetry from Ravenna Press, each with an increasing number of maps, graphs, and comics interwoven. Watch for his Punk Poems Complete forthcoming in the fall of 2023. More at punkpoet.net.
Anna Jenkins is a music teacher, composer, arranger, and therapeutic musician. She performs with the harp quartet, Tetraharp; the girl band previously called Nasty Woman, now North Sound; the duo Instruments of Peace; Resonance Harp Duo; and she directs the Eastside Harp Ensemble and Circle. Anna enjoys adding a touch of harp to the spoken word with Band of Poets.
Ted McMahon is a Seattle poet and percussionist. A long-time contributor to Easy Speak Seattle, he is happy to be a collaborator with Band of Poets.
Jed Myers has been immersed in poetry and music since his youth. He’s author of Watching the Perseids (winner, Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and, due out in 2024, Learning to Hold (winner, Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award). His fifth chapbook is The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift (winner, Sheila-Na-Gig Chapbook Contest). Recent work appears in Rattle, The Poetry Review (UK), Rhino, The Greensboro Review, Rust + Moth, Terrain, On the Seawall, Solstice, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he participates in various musical ensembles and serves as editor for the journal Bracken.
Rosanne Olson has spent a lifetime in the arts: photographer, educator, author, and songwriter. In 2018 she released her first album, Love in Your Country. Listen to her songs at www.rosanneolsonmusic.com or on Spotify.