Description: Worlds tiny as an ant hwy on a grass blade, big as Istanbul or Saskatchewan, love of language, history, narrative, place - precise, luminous, & casual as conversation.
Brief description: Douglas Spangle was born in Roanoak, Virginia, finished high school in Turkey, and spent years as a stagehand for the Münchner Kammerspiele Schauspielhaus. Now a long-time resident of Portland, Oregon, he has emceed hundreds of poetry readings throughout the city and co-organized city-wide events such as Artquake. He is spending his pandemic time translating the Swiss-German poems of Clemens Umbricht and Florian Vetsch. For a number of years he has also acted as copy-editor for Portland's weekly homeless community newspaper, Street Roots.
Review Quotes:
This collection accumulates the power, passion skill and intelligence of his poetry, to the point where I wonder, is anybody writing better than this? - Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Award winner, poet, novelist, & essayist, author of Hard Words, Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, & Lavinia
Portland, Oregon-based poet Douglas Spangle has a keen sense of the overlooked detail. His poems are marked by a sweeping memory that charges and deepens their topography. His verse is full of empathy and engagement. Without a doubt, they are part of the Great American Poetry Book. - Florian Vetsch, essayist, translator, editor, author, 43 New Poems
Satiric, comic, or movingly lyric, this work invokes landscapes and human-scapes "crowded with absurdities." A poet whose "new word is a new world," Spangle modestly tells us his "...pen is a pennywhistle." In truth, his pen is a full orchestra creating the music of a vast and varied world. - Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate
This is not just another White Concrete Day. It binds the harvest of a poet known primarily in the Northwest. I have my favorites: "Mr. Chang Composes a Letter" is magnificent. - klipschutz, author, This Drawn & Quartered Moon
Douglas Spangle is the mayor of Poetlandia. - Casey Bush, author, Blessings of Madness, and Kiss of the Apocalypse, Senior Editor of The Bear Deluxe Magazine
In A White Concrete Day, Douglas Spangle records the world he's lived in, as small as an ant highway on a grass blade, or large as Istanbul, the province of Saskatchewan, or the intersection of 21st & Powell. His passage is marked by love of language, history, narrative and place. - Barbara La Morticella, Atomic Poet & host of KBOO's Talking Earth