Coyote Press

Issue date: 2/1/01 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: Babette May-Herrmann Poets Joe Millar and wife Dorianne Laux at Cafe Roma [Click to enlarge]

CCSN’s literary journal, Red Rock Review hosted a poetry reading by their two finest contributing poets, Dorianne Laux and Joe Millar. Laux and Millar joined in a reading at Café Espresso Roma, across from UNLV. This event is part of the Red Rock Review Spring 2001 Reading Series.

The café was filled with the haze of cigarette smoke and the noise of avant-garde looking college students. All this combined with the smell of coffee, created a beatnik atmosphere. Millar, an urban poet who focuses on ordinary life and circumstance, read poetry on Las Vegas lifestyle and gambling. His poem "losing," is about, of course, losing at gambling – something that many Las Vegas locals can relate to.

In a poem about spring, Laux reads to the smoke-filled crowd "The orgasms of organisms," which is about love among bugs. In addition, to complement the crowd of mostly young smokers, she read her poem, "Smoke," which is about the nervous action taken by someone who is trying to quit smoking.

Laux is an associate professor and program director of creative writing at the University of Oregon. She is known as a narrative poet who concentrates on human emotion and drama. CCSN English Professor Tina Eliopulos said, "She takes everyday rites of passage and spins them into metaphors."

Among Laux publications are four volumes of poetry – Smoke, What We Carry (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Awake, and Three West Coast Women – and a collaboration with Kim Addonizio called The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. She has also recently taught a number of workshops including one for the American Press Institute (API) for journalists who want to write better prose.

Millar’s first full-length collection, Overtime, a finalist for the 1999 National Poetry Series, will be published in November 2001 by Eastern Washington University Press.

A winner of a Montalvo Center for the Arts Fellowship and an Oregon Arts Council grant, Millar has also taken prizes from the Writer’s Union Competition and the Jacaranda Award for Poetry. He now teaches at Mt Hood Community College in Oregon.

Both of the writers’ poetry is featured in the winter 2001 issue of Red Rock Review, which is available for purchase at all three campus bookstores.

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