Dick Bakken

Dick Bakken began performing his poetry without a manuscript in 1972 and within a year was collaborating with dancers at innovative performance and spoken word poetry events. From 1975 to 1980 he crisscrossed the country giving readings and performances until, during a tour of the Southwest, he settled in Bisbee, Arizona where he still lives. Dick Bakken was the director of Heart of Carlos Spoken Arts, Jump the Border! and the Bisbee Poetry Festival. He was also poetry editor at The Bisbee News.

Dick Bakken's poetry has been published in over 200 periodicals and anthologies, eight books, on two audio cassettes, and two video cassettes. He has won numerous awards and grants, and continues to tour, working with musicians, mimes, painters, sculptors, photographers, and filmmakers.

Dick Bakken is one of the few poets in America whose reputation, a substantial one, rests almost solely on his public readings which are lyrical, dramatic, liturgical and celebratory all at once.

-- wrote Christopher Howell, owner of Lynx House Press.

Dick is on a two-month tour of the Pacific Northwest. His stop in Newport is his only appearance on Oregon's coast

Leonard Cirino

Leonard Cirino is a prolific, opinionated, outspoken poet and essayist with twenty-four poetry books and chapbooks produced by a dozen publishers since 1987. He has devoted over three decades of his life to reading, writing, editing and publishing poetry. His book, The Terrible Wilderness of Self, published by Cedar Hill Publications, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1998. He was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 2003.

He is the past editor of Pygmy Forest Press and Semi-Dwarf Review. His poems and essays about literature are widely published on Internet sites and in literary journals and anthologies.

His two most recent books are Poems of the Royal Concubine Li Xi, which won Lummox of the Year Award in 2002, and Everything Is Small From a Distance, published by Pygmy Forest Press in 2004. His books, chapbooks and broadsides are available for sale at the back table.

My poems are the way I express myself spiritually, I go deep into the dark side and the unconscious. I believe in the power of rituals, chanting, contemplation and prayer. I consider myself a mystical anarchist.

-- Leonard Cirino

Please welcome to Newport, Leonard Cirino