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About The Clackamas print. (Oregon City, Oregon) 1989-2019 | View Entire Issue (May 23, 2007)
2 Clackamas Print News Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Poet pulls from pop culture, Super-Man Emily Walters The Clackamas Print All photos by Nicholas Baker Clackamas Print ■ Gene Winfield, custom-car builder, demonstrated how to do a top-chopping on May 19 and 20. There were approxi mately 100 registered attendees. Various tools and equipment were donated from local autoshops that were later signed by Winfield and then auctioned off to members of the audience. After the event, Winfield stuck around to sign autographs, answer questions and sell merchandise. Winfield has appeared on the hit TV show Monster Garage. WHAT IS TOP-CHOPPING? I I ! Top-chopping is the practice of making very specific ! modifications and alterations in order to lower the roof | of an automobile. J TOP: Assistant Alex Robinson welds as legendary custom-car builder Gene Winfield makes window fittings on a 1936 three- window Ford Coupe. ABOVE: Gene Winfield and Pete Shirley work to reshape a win dow frame so it fits in the car’s now-smaller exterior. - Compiled by Nicholas Baker, The Clackamas Print Next Week: Profiles on 2007 College Retirees Trees, elks, ravens, the moon ... and Cher’s tits. These were a few of the sub jects of the poems that nation ally-recognized poet Dorianne LautTread last Friday to an audi ence made up of students and several of Clackamas’ English instructors, in the Literary Arts Center. Laux, who has a Bachelor’s Degree in English, works as a professor in University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program, as well as the Master’s Program at Pacific University. She has many awards to her name, including a Pushcart Prize, an Editor’s Choice III Award, the Oregon Book Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. As a single mother in her twenties, she first started seri ously writing poetry between several jobs. Today, she is married to fellow poet Joseph Millar and has four poetry col lections published, with a fifth soon to be finished. Laux began the readings with the slightly raunchy poem “Cher,” describing her longing to be like the pop icon, “butt,” “tits” and all. This is from her newest book, titled Superman: The Chapbook, which holds poems inspired by pop culture, including The Beatles and, yes, Super-Man. Next was what she said is a favorite of hers, from her fourth book, Facts About the Moon, titled “The Life of Trees.” This poem was inspired by her com ing to Oregon and falling in love with the trees here. The following two poems were inspired by and written during trips with her husband. The first, titled “Ravens of Denali,” she wrote while in Alaska, after her husband told her a lot about the ravens that they were seeing everywhere. At the reading, her husband Jennesa Palmer Clackamas Prij Award-winning poet Dorianne Laux shaires some of her work with Clackamas students. said that when he heard the poem for the first time, he said “Jesus, you stole my bird!” The other, called “The Crossing,” was a humorous piece about an elk in the mid dle of the road, which her husband tried to get to move so that their car could pass. It ended with the line, “This was how I knew the marriage would last.” “I do a lot of writing on the bus,” Laux said, leading into her next poem, titled “The Secret of the Backs,” inspired by the backs of people walk ing along the sidewalk. “I thought, ‘That’s never been done before’” Laux finished out the hoar with the poems “Moon in the Window” and, last but not least, “Facts About the Moon.” “[‘Facts About the Moor is] filled with real facts from , the Discovery Channel, whiqh I watch religiously,” she explained to listeners, laugh ing- With her elegant poemk, sometimes lightly peppered with swear words, Lauxls reading provided an enjoyable stop between classes for many students. The quick wit and underlying ponderings of her poems left the audience with something to think about. I The dangers of global warming and hope for the future Fufkln Vollmayer | The Clackamas Print Just in case you haven’t read the latest U.N. report on glob al warming, it’s not as bad as scientists have been predicting - it’s worse. The ocean is turning into a hot vat of nitrogen that’s killing off plankton and the fish that eat them. Droughts and Hurricane Katrina-size storms will become more frequent on almost every, continent around the world. But to listen to philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore; there is actually hope. She’s explored ideas, modernity and the aston ishing beauty of the Northwest in Riverwalk, Holdfast and Pine Island Paradox. As the featured speaker at last week’s Sustainability Project, Moore announced, “I’m going to give an optimistic talk ... it’s a survival characteristic. Optimism is a belief; it’s hoping with good reason.” Moore says repairing ecosys tems is coming from the ground up, from grassroots organiza tions. “Evidence of this ‘great turn ing’ is not coming, in case you hadn’t noticed, from the White House or from Exxon Mobil,” she said. “It’s coming from the growing army of individuals and community groups who, planting one tree at a time, or cleaning up one neighborhood at a time ... are literally planting seeds of change.”. Moore has her feet in two worlds. She’s a philoso phy professor at Oregon State University, and she spends sum mers up in the Alaskan archi pelago, immersed in the natu ral world. It’s from one of the islands there that she wrote Pine Island Paradox. In an environmental eth ics class she teaches, she has students choose a place within walking distance to campus, and they then recommend how to remedy an environmental justice issue of habitat loss or pollu tion. She says her students, like society as a whole, can feel overwhelmed by the scale of biological degradation around them. “In my classes, students ask, ‘How can I change the world? I’m one person,”’ she said. “You live a life you believe in, and you can change the world.” Moore takes the old bumper sticker adage, ‘Think Globally; Act Locally,’ and only half-jok- ingly puts her students though a 12-step program she’s entitled “Consumers Anonymous.” “We are so disconnected from community [that consum ing] is a reaction to grief and stress,” she said. “Step 3 of Consumer’s Anonymous really is to reduce what ws buy.” Through her teaching and her writing, she invites her students and her readers tp do what she does: to start noticing the natural world around them, before it’s all gone. Yet, she does not despair, as she believes that individuals and even whole countries are out of denial about how human activity is poisoning the planet. Moorework reflects what Lydia Bashaw Clackamas Print Kathleen Dean Moore autographs a personalized note to set- proclaimed longtime student Sue Andersen in her personal copy of one of Moore’s books. has been the truly interdisciplin ary nature of the Sustainability Series: biology, oceanography and literature. So, it’s fitting that a philosopher would quote historian Stephen Ambrose, who declared, “The primary task of the 21st century will be envi ronmental restoration or nothmg at all.”
