Mari Werner ~ Featured Poet at Second Sunday Poetry Series ~ October 2012

Mari Werner
Mari Werner writes when someone pays her to document how to use their software or when she feels passionate about communicating something—or sometimes she just writes anyway. Most often she writes prose, sometimes she writes poetry, and sometimes she writes prose and then parses it into lines and pretends it’s poetry so people will let her read it at poetry readings. Usually she gets away with this. She does it because she loves poetry readings and thinks people gathering to share their creations is one of the best things happening on the planet. She reads frequently at venues in the Pasadena and foothills areas, and was a featured reader at Village Poets in Tujunga last year.

Her poetry has been published in two Poets on Site anthologies, the 2011 Poetry and Cookies anthology from the Altadena Library, her own chapbook—Words from the Edges, as well as several web sites. Her columns have been published in the LA Daily News and The Latest.

She also writes on a subject almost totally devoid of poetry, namely money and economics. She does this because she feels there are critical flaws in the current economic system that everyone should know about and hardly anyone does. She has a book on the subject in slow progress as well as a web site recently published.

Fighting

I’m done with it.
Wave your sword if you want to.
You won’t hear it clashing
against mine.
I’ve lost mine actually.
I didn’t even put it away
or beat it into a plowshare.
I just put it down someplace
and forgot about it.

Moorpark Park

On the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard
and Moorpark Street is a park
called Moorpark Park.
It doesn’t have a parking lot.
But if it did, it would be called
Moorpark Park Parking Lot.