Steve Arnston
After High School in Seattle I majored in music at the University of Washington studying the piano I’ve always loved Mozart and Chopin and somehow one way or the other I got interested in poetry after moving to San Francisco from Seattle in 64 it was a gradual process I began my studies with Emily Dickinson Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and in the late 60s and early 70s was part of a group that studied Shakespeare together the readings in San Francisco at places like Cafe Babar and the Old Spaghetti Factory started me doing more and more of my own writing and evolving a style suitable for what I wanted to say I was heavily influenced by the San Francisco writers and in Berkeley too over a period of years I came to concentrate on geography and wrote pieces about the Oregon coast also I have been with the Waverley writers for more than 25 years and made many friends there I will have a book available for purchase on March 12th the following is excerpted from this book “To and From on the Day-for-Night Coast”
… we came to Lone Ranch – and the creek belonged to its enterprise – false promises gone to bed with exactitude – and after, after the milking and other chores, think you never needed techno to find a rhythm – running errands for the winds that made a prairie of the Cape, Cape Ferrelo – was it always treeless like this? – perhaps the working ranch is why – or some computer in the landscape, smoothing, soothing – so that you make a good death – and lie down for the duration of statehood – pretending Oregon outlasts even its own geology and joins the moon and making rules – I said to believe and belong, where Emptiness is judged a higher truth – haunting okay in the sunlight, even – as if it didn’t matter the condition of the clock, with one way proposals – you get ahead of the night and ghost the day – more accurately drifting, translucent – so that no ordinary brambles spread in the extant Sitka – but seem to burgeon by faith alone – while saplings add new inches of lighter green to turquoise with painstaking freshness…