Poetry Unbound

Poetry Unbound
MEMORIAL FOR TOM QUONTAMATTEO
(November 9, 1944 – September 18, 2012)

Tom Quontamatteo was born in Oakland, California at the end of World War II. Although he received a baseball scholarship to the University of California, he was diverted to poetry on taking a class “Modern Poetry” in 1967. He joined the Peace Core in the early 1970s and kept detailed journals of those times. His poetry appears in Emptiness That Plays So Rough (Broken Shadow, 1995) and The Scribbler (Number 75, April 2013), which also includes reminiscences by those who knew his work. His poetry gained a small but devoted following for its precision and honesty. He struggled with manic-depressive disorder for much of his later life, and died in a care home in Hayward last year. He writes, “I'd like the memory of me to be a happy one, I'd like to leave an afterglow of smiles when life is done. I'd like to leave an echo whispering softly down the ways of happy times and laughing times and bright and sunny days .I'd like the tears of those who grieve to dry before the sun.... ”

Poetry Unbound presents passionate wordsmiths on the first Sunday of each month, with a brief open mic, at the Art House Gallery in Berkeley. Hosted by Clive Matson, Karla Brundage, and Richard Loranger.

Poetry Unbound Reading Series

Special event, poems and memories of Tom Quontamatteo by:

Larry Beresford
Sally Bolger
Clive Matson
Adam David Miller
and
Judy Wells

with a brief open mic for new readers of Quontamatteo’s poems (books available to read from)

hosted by Clive Matson, Karla Brundage, and Richard Loranger

Sunday, August 4, 2013
sign-up 5 pm
start 5:15
free
Art House Gallery
2905 Shattuck Ave.
(one block north of Ashby, and close to Ashby BART)
Berkeley


PERFORMER BIOS

Larry Beresford: “I met Tom Quontamatteo in a Tuesday night poetry class in Clive Matson's living room circa 1990. We did a lot of open readings and poetry salons over the years and spent many evenings talking about poetry at the Rite Spot cafe. He was there the first time I had an intimate conversation with my eventual wife, Rose Mark, after a Sunday evening poetry potluck at the Moonwhistle day care center in Diamond Heights.”
Larry Beresford is a freelance medical journalist living in San Francisco, frequent performer on the Bay Area open reading circuit and author of two books of poetry, Under a Gibbous Moon: The Adventures of Mister Funky and Family Poems.

Sally Bolger: “A river of words and language always has flowed through my life, but it was just over a year ago that I finally dove into the current in search of my writing voice. I was given a copy of Tom's book at a Poetry Saloon not long after his death. The following Sunday I hiked Mount Tam, this time with Tom's book as company. As I walked, I read, and soon found myself following a trail of feathers that took my feet off the known route to an area of the mountain I had never explored, just as Tom's poetry took me to new places that had been there all along. ‘Hiking with Tom’ is the telling of that journey.”

Clive Matson has continued Temescal’s second-Friday of the month reading group, “Poetry Saloon (drunk on poetry),” started by Gail Ford in the early 1990s. Among the vibrant writers who attended was Tom Quontamatteo, whose quiet delivery belied the intense, closely observed emotion behind his poems. Clive teaches creative writing and has lately organized the Chalcedony poems of the last ten years into a manuscript, Your Hands Say Breathless Rose.

Adam David Miller thinks of Northern California as his garden,
which he has been tending for the past half-century.
“Grand Tom rode the range and ran the gamut;
He could be one of us.”

Judy Wells attended Alhambra High School, class of '62, in Martinez, California with Tom Quontamatteo. Years later, they met again in Berkeley with a surprising common interest. They both had become poets, a trajectory neither had foreseen when they graduated high school in their traditional, small home town.