Ryan Masters says he hopes to create an event that will allow for such spontaneous occurrences as a ninety-year-old woman reading a poem about pigs. Masters, arts writer for the Weekly and the former poet-in-residence for Pacific Grove, just finished editing the 2004 Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets. He says that after organizing two recent “marathon” poetry festivals, he’s hoping to offer something a little more lively. And shorter.

“It was neat, and historic,” he says of the previous festivals. “But I don’t want to have people sit through eight hours of poetry.”

At a book release party on Saturday, Jan. 22, Masters will be playing guitar and singing in his band Benthos, which includes another local poet and musician, William Minor. Verse will be recited by poets who contributed to the anthology, who will reach into a hat and read each other’s work at random.

The idea for grouping local poets in a single work came, Masters says, about a year and a half ago, when he was in a bookstore flipping through a compilation of Monterey authors’ short stories.

“It was just a natural extension after the two years I did the residency and met so many poets,” he says.

Masters put out a call for poetry and got 800 submissions. Of those, he took almost a hundred, and with Aptos-based publisher Susana “Suki” Wessling, of Chatoyant Press, created the anthology.

Masters says that the anthology is doing surprisingly well for poetry, boosted in part by an endorsement from Dana Gioia, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts: “The anthology is terrific,” he says.

Minor, who contributed to the anthology and wrote the introduction, points out the result is surprisingly cohesive, given that the poems aren’t organized around a theme or a place.

“I think Ryan did a brilliant job of assembling the poems,” he says. “What’s amazing is that the poems are not arranged thematically, but alphabetically.”

“I just took the strongest work,” Masters says. “I wasn’t looking for regionally-flavored stuff. The ocean does pop a lot. But there are also poems about the desert, September 11, and nursing homes.”

Masters chose poems that he felt were accessible.

“A lot of people are scared off by poetry,” he says. “They think it’s like math; that there’s a correct solution. I think people feel stupid if they aren’t getting it. They don’t want to have to work at it.

“But like music or a work of art, poetry is completely subjective. A poem succeeds if it only embeds one image…if you come away with the essence.”

Masters points to a poem by Aptos-based former high school teacher Karen Wood Hepner:

Me, Last Year

nice nice nice nice nice
woman woman woman woman woman
wife wife wife wife wife
pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty

glass glass glass glass glass

hush hush hush hush hush
smooth smooth smooth smooth smooth
smile smile smile smile smile
eyelashes eyelashes eyelashes eyelashes eyelashes

crack

Minor says that poems work simply as a result of good writing.

“I think poetry is ingrained in our culture,” he says. “If a writer is saying something very well in words, people are in tune with that.”

Contributors to the 2004 Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets will read poems on sat, Jan. 22, from 5-8pm, at the Pacific Grove Art Center, 568 Lighthouse Ave., Pacific Grove. 251-0046. The Anthology can be purchased for $15 at local independent bookstores and at www.chatoyant.com.