Remember to Wave: A Poetry Walk in North Portland with Kaia Sand

Sunday, September 28
12:00 pm

Meet at Expo MAX stop (yellow line), at the torii gate at the north end of the platform
Free


We walk for many reasons, and one of those reasons can be poetry.

Rather than gather in a salon or saloon, we'll step outdoors. This is a poetry reading that will "take place" as a two-hour walk, in the spirit of the Situationist dérive. We'll walk near the Columbia Slough where Japanese Americans were "relocated," and where the Vanport flood destroyed the World War II-era city.

We'll embark at noon from the Expo MAX Station, take an approximately two-mile walk, and end at the Delta Park/Vanport station. Along the way, we'll stop for an improvisational ode and a snack of seasonal fruit.

This will be an uncovered, outdoor event, so be sure to wear walking shoes and--if it's raining--bring an umbrella!

Please email Kaia by September 24 with a mailing address if you would like to receive a map of the poetry walk route in the mail. A map will also be posted online as a pdf.

This project is funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council



Kaia Sand authored the poetry collection interval (Edge Books 2004), selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year, and with Jules Boykoff she coauthored the just-released Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space (Palm Press 2008). She created a dusie kollektiv chapbook for her poem "tiny arctic ice," which was reconfigured as a broadside by Bowerbox Press and as an artist's book by Jim Dine (Steidl Editions 2008). She recently performed poetry collaged entirely from the North American Free Trade Agreement at the Positions Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her investigations of Pacific Northwest geographies will be published as a chapbook through Tinfish Press (Hawaii 2009), and an essay from this project will be published in the forthcoming Citadel of the Spirit (Nestucca Spit Press).


tiny arctic ice

Inhale, exhale
6.6 billion people breathing
Some of us in captivity
Our crops far-flung
Prison is a place where children sometimes visit
Jetted from Japan, edamame is eaten in England
Airplane air is hard to share
I breathe in what you breathe out, stranger
We send tea leaves to distant friends
Araucana chickens won't lay eggs in captivity
Airplanes of roses lift above Quito mountains
When the fish diminish, folks find jobs in prisons
Sometimes children visit
Terminator seeds are hard to share
And the fish diminish
The roses, the tea, and the edamame, far-flung
The roses, the tea and you
You breathe in what I breathe out, friend