Chaucer’s Poetry Reading-Paul J. Willis

Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street, Santa Barbara) will host local poet Paul J. Willis for a reading and signing of his book “Losing Streak” on Wednesday, May 15 at 6 p.m.

Book Description “Losing Streak”

During Covid, Paul Willis found himself writing light verse to cheer himself up.  The resulting collection, Losing Streak, is composed of rhymed and metered and oddly funny (and sometimes serious) poetry that ranges in subject matter from venerable historical figures like Petrarch and Shakespeare and Milton to less venerable contemporary figures like Barbie and Mahomes and Trump.

 Book Description Praise for “Losing Streak”

What a relief to be reading light verse, with meter and rhyme and clear themes carried forward. There’s a spaciousness to these poems, and a welcoming. Some of them are occasional and public, and that’s a relief, too, and many of them are quietly funny, in contrast to all the high seriousness of most poetry today. And yet this is a serious book in its own way, exactly because it refuses to take itself too seriously and chooses instead to honor colleagues and students and friends, and here and there are several beautifully contemplative pieces of formal verse, like something old-fashioned and cherished and now lost. As Willis puts it in one of these poems, a tribute to a friend, “What he writes and what he knows is / fit and fine, and sweet encloses.”—Chris Anderson, author of You Never Know

The world feels divided right now and tense and many of us are beleaguered by stress. In Losing Streak, Paul Willis shows himself a master of stress—the metric kind—as well as irony, wit and humor. As I read, the happy jog of these lines wafted me from stress to laughter and light and sometimes, even, hope.—Jeanne Murray Walker, author of Helping the Morning

 Both a fine sense of form and a keen sense of humor are on display in Paul Willis’s eighth poetry collection, Losing Streak. Passing with ease from the world of office work to the world of nature, he’s disillusioned with life but never gives up on it. He remarks that after a month of Covid lockdown “the most important thing / is who beat whom in Scrabble.” He observes the beauty of giant thistles, adding, “For all the pains / we take to end your lives, what wanes / is our short work.” And when, like Spenser, he writes lovers’ names in the sand, he adds with a flourish, “I wrote them in Times Roman, twelve-point font— / and that was quite a trick.” The final poem, “Steven,” is a dramatic monologue in which a young couple’s life is changed by an encounter with a stranger while hiking in the Sierra Nevada.  It’s a fitting ending, as the author leaves us on a note of adventure combined with universal experience: the kindness of strangers.—Gail White, author of Paper Cuts

Author Biography –  Paul J. Willis is an emeritus professor of English at Westmont College and a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara. In addition to Losing Streak, his latest volume, he has published seven previous collections of poetry. He has also published two YA novels, The Alpine Tales and All in a Garden Green; two essay collections, Bright Shoots of Everlastingness and To Build a Trail; and two coedited literary anthologies, In a Fine Frenzy and A Radiant Birth. Each January, Paul hosts an outdoor community reading of the work of former national poet laureate William Stafford on the site of the Los Prietos Civilian Public Service camp in Los Padres National Forest, where Stafford served as a conscientious objector during World War II.