Clear Falls String Trio at FPL

David Cowen reads from Seven Yards of Sorrow: October 29

Hope Lutheran Bell Choir at FPL

The Bluebird K7 Story at FPL

Shakespeare at FPL

David Cowen reads from Seven Yards of Sorrow at FPL on October 29

ESL at FPL

Anis Shivani reads at FPL's Off the Page Poetry series

Off the Page Poetry series with Jonathan Moody

Anis Shivani and Jonathan Moody at FPL: August 4

Anis Shivani and Jonathan Moody will be featured poets at our next Off the Page Poetry series on Thursday, August 4 at 7pm. 

Anis Shivani’s books include Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, My Tranquil War and Other Poems, Karachi Raj: A Novel, Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems, and Soraya: Sonnets. Books forthcoming in 2016 include Both Sides of the Divide: Observing the Sublime and the Mundane in Contemporary Writing and the novel A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. Anis’s work appears recently in Western Humanities Review, New Letters, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, AGNI, Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a 2012 Pushcart Prize, graduated from Harvard College, and currently lives in Houston, Texas. 

Soraya is repetition (100 sonnets in exactly the same style) and collage (fragments of verbal fusillades from dictionaries), as is the wont of postmodernism, and it also sets itself constraints (each sonnet has some consistent peculiarities, such as the recurrence of Soraya in the octave and the sestet, the close juxtaposition of certain discourses such as medieval medicine and 20th-century science, etc.) as a way of liberation, which is true of

Oulipo and other ‘mechanically-generated’ poetry of the latter half of the 20th century. But more than that I see Soraya as a specifically postcolonial book; the kind of constraint it operates under is almost a reflection of the constraints imposed upon the narrated self or the colonised subjectivity, and it appropriates the constraints not in a merely parodistic way but as a way of declaring freedom.—from dawn.com

90.

Do you know the right color temperature

to make Colorado and its pathetic fallacy

transparent? Who is patently on our candid

sunbathing side? Visions of sump in which,

Soraya, alienated from the solstice of weight,

the fovea at last perceives the femme fatale,

Fata Morgana in the fat city. Fatimid endpaper

is as good as effleurage to my face.

Soraya (delta rhythms free like cucumber

mosaic) why is sleep our costume of pairing?

In the councils of mutism, the muzhiks’

nausea is nugget of the nuclear age proven

like pseudorabies: rainfall on raking light,

the raised beach at the end of the rainbow.


More Anis Shivani:
Anis Shivani at FPL's Off the Page Poetry series 

Off the Page Poetry: August 4

World War II Veteran Birney Havey Jr. at Friendswood Library

Summer Days: Baseball poems by Chip Dameron

Relay Man 
                  

              Somebody drives

the ball through the gap in left

center, and the shortstop drifts

beyond the infield’s arc, waiting

for the left or center fielder

to run the ball down and fling it

toward him.

                      On the fly or off

a hop, no matter, the thing’s

to time the swing back home,

turning and whipping a hard

overhand to the plate, where

the runner from first cannot slide

out of his pending doom, ball

buried in a leather web, ending

the inning.

                      At short you live

to make the pivot, you trust

your arm to get it right, this

humming toward home, and lordy

do you let it fly.

Game Catch

          The closest thing

to a lie is a moment’s

deepest yes: the perfect

dive for a ball off a bat,

the gloved and echoed sting

verifying every hidden wish,

the shift and fling as true

as summer.

                       The hum we hear

is just the buzzing of the day’s

doings, wind across an infield,

electric lights that click on

and carve out a lifetime,

where line drives up the alleys

can tear holes in the air

that can’t be fixed.

 Chip Dameron is the author of a travel book and seven collections of poetry, including two published in 2015: Waiting for an Etcher (Lamar University Press) and Drinking from the River: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015 (Wings Press). His poems and essays on contemporary writers have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Southwestern American Literature, San Pedro River Review, Puerto del Sol, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, New Texas, and many other journals and anthologies, as well as publications in Canada, Ireland, Nigeria, India, China, Thailand, and New Zealand. Dameron has co-edited two literary magazines, Thicket and Chachalaca Poetry Review, and served on the editorial board of four others. A two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize in poetry, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and Professor Emeritus at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, he lives and writes in Brownsville, Texas.

 

Greetings from Galveston at FPL

Self-Publishing Class at FPL

FPL presents Thirteen Poets part 1

Vote for Friendswood High School Art Department

We are so excited to announce that Friendswood High School art department has advanced to the semi-finals in the VANS Custom Culture tennis shoe contest! 3,000 schools entered this contest, and were challenged to design four pairs of VANS tennis shoes with the themes of music, art, local flavor, and VANS sponsored sport.  Our school has made it into the TOP 50 in the nation!  The next phase is on-line voting.

The public voting phase is April 27th-May 11th.  You can help us win a trip of a lifetime for our students to California this summer! We will also have a chance to win $50,000 for the FHS art department!

Chaja Verveer to receive library award

The Friendswood Public Library is pleased to announce the 2016 recipient of the Friendswood Library Award for Outstanding Cultural Programming is local resident Chaja Verveer.

Chaja Verveer serves on the Advisory Board of the Holocaust Museum Houston and is president of Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Houston.  She has also served for five years on the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. 

The Friendswood library carries two books published by Holocaust Museum Houston featuring stories and written works by Chaja Verveer.  Her story as a child survivor of the Holocaust is one of numerous stories featured in the book Ten Years: Rememberance. Education. Hope., and the book The Album: Shadows of Memory features three of Chaja’s written works.  

Chaja’s library programs have focused on her experience as a child survivor of the Holocaust.  Her program Surviving the Holocaust in November of 2007 concluded with a craft service project to create butterflies to be donated to the Holocaust Museum Houston’s Butterfly Project.  The museum collected 1.5 million handmade butterflies to create a breath-taking exhibit in remembrance of the children that perished in the Holocaust.  The exhibit, Taking Flight, opened this April. Her 2014 program, The Improbable Survivor, was attended by an appreciative and over-flowing audience. This program was captured on video and can be borrowed from the Friendswood library. 

The Friendswood library will present this award to Chaja Verveer on Thursday, April 28 at the conclusion of a 7pm program in celebration of National Poetry Month.