Steve Trenam Featured At Third Thursday Poetry At Shindig At Sea Ranch, January 19
By Blake More
On Thursday, January 19, at 7:00pm, Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature Petaluma Poet Steve Trenam. The reading will take place at Shindig (as well as virtually via Zoom), an emerging new tea and wine salon located on Verdant View off Annapolis Road at the Ranch Center in The Sea Ranch. The reading will begin with live improv jazz, followed by a featured reading with Steve Trenam, then an open mic with jazz improv, and finally the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
Steve is a Santa Rosa Junior College Instructor of poetry writing in their Older Adults Program. He is also a founding member of Poetic License Sonoma which collaborates with the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in conducting poetry readings on the fourth Tuesday of each month, featuring such headliners as Prartho Sereno, Maya Khosla, Elizabeth Herron, and Megan Merchant. Steve was the recipient of a Randolph Newman grant which brought the 24th U. S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, to SRJC in November.
Steve’s book of poetry, An Affront to Gravity, was published recently by Blue Light Press and can be ordered through your local bookstore or Amazon. Some of his poetry and ceramic art can be found in an ekphrastic poetry book, Canyon, River, Stone and Light, and Pandemic Puzzle Poems, both published by Blue Light Press, 2021. Other poems appear in Crossroads, the Redwood Writers poetry anthology, May 2022; Jerry Jazz Musician: A Collection of Jazz Poetry—Fall/Winter, 2022-23 Edition; and Poem for the Day with Larry Robinson, in multiple publications online.
Steve Trenam’s mother owned a bookstore from 1962 to 1985 in Petaluma, California. It was called Alta’s Old Book Shop, and its value lay not in glossy modernity, but in being a dusty delivery room for the birth of ideas. It was for Steve, a source for answers and insights which enlarged his personal life and gave it meaning. It also generated the impulse to write.
As far as his poetry is concerned, Steve feels neither sure-footed nor clear. Metaphorically speaking, he is out on a leafless limb with just spider webs and moss, listening to the silken slip of water over stone.
More information about Steve’s work is available at https://www.sebarts.org/literary-arts and https://poeticlicensesonoma.com/.
Shindig is located next door to Birdsong Clinic & Tea Shop (directions at birdsongclinic.com), and more information on Shindig can be gathered by emailing shindig.searanch@gmail.com. Third Thursday Poetry is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, many anonymous donors, and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
