Short Forms

                           Jane Lipman                                                                 Donald Levering                                                               Wayne Lee

Lee, Levering and Lipman present “Short Forms” poetry reading and discussion at Teatro Paraguas on June 29

Santa Fe poets Wayne Lee, Donald Levering and Jane Lipman will read and discuss short-form poems at Teatro Paraguas, 3205 Calle Marie in Santa Fe on Sunday, June 29 at 5 p.m. Short-form poetry refers to any works of poetry that are fairly short in length, while still maintaining many of the features and devices of longer traditional poetic works. 

Lee will read septets (seven-line poems) from his new collection, Dining on Salt: Four Seasons of Septets (Cornerstone Press). Levering will read ramages (eight-line poems) and ghazals (a short series of couplets), and Lipman will read haiku from her new collection, in every peach the taste of thunder (Hummingbird Hollow Press). 

“I became enamored of the power and potential of septets as I researched traditional seven-line forms while working on Dining on Salt,” Lee says. “I discovered a rich body of septet literature dating back more than 800 years to Chaucer’s time. Their compact size strikes a balance between the mini-satori of the haiku and the classical architecture of the sonnet.”

“A ramage relies on internal rhyme, which comes naturally to me, and which I employ extensively in my poems anyway,” says Levering. “I like that the form was invented by Robert Bly, who was one of my poet-heroes. The ghazal is an ancient form from the Middle East and India that encourages the poet to create epigram-like couplets.”

Of haiku, Lipman simply says, “I love the mystery in short forms.”

Writer, editor and teacher Wayne Lee (wayneleepoet.com) lives in Santa Fe. His poems have appeared in Tupelo Press, Slipstream, The New Guard, The Lowestoft Chronicle and many other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and four Best of the Net Awards. Lee’s collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. His collection Buddha’s Cat was published by Whistle Lake Press in June 2024, and his collection The Beautiful Foolishness is forthcoming from Casa Urraca Press in March 2026.

Donald Levering was born in Kansas City and grew up there and in Oceanside, New York. In addition to being awarded an NEA Fellowship, he won the Quest for Peace Prize in rhetoric, the 2017 Tor House Foundation Prize and was Runner-Up for the Ruth Stone Prize in 2016. His 16th poetry book, Breaking Down Familiar, was 1st place winner in the 2023 New Mexico Press Women Creative Verse Book Contest. He lives in Santa Fe.

Jane Lipman’s haiku collection, in every peach the taste of thunder, was published in 2024. Her first full-length poetry collection, On the Back Porch of the Moon, Black Swan Editions, 2012, won the 2013 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award and a 2013 NM Press Women’s Award. Her chapbooks, The Rapture of Tulips and White Crow’s Secret Life, Pudding House Publications, 2009, were finalists for NM Book Awards in Poetry in 2009 and 2010, respectively. Her poem “Unsung” won Second Prize in a national poetry contest, Honoring Cole Porter, 2015. She was First Runner Up in the Lummox Poetry Contest, 2016. During the ‘80s she founded and directed Taos Institute, sponsoring performances and workshops by Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, Gioia Timpanelli, Paul Winter, and others.  She gave Comedy Therapy and Enneagram workshops in NM––also in Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Russia.  Pre-Covid, she gave Mystical Poetry and Writing workshops tri-annually in Santa Fe.  She’s lived in northern New Mexico since 1970.

Jane received an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Graduate Writing Seminars, was an activist in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 70s. Founder/director of Taos Institute and a retired psychotherapist, she teaches occasional courses and workshops in northern New Mexico. 

The reading will be followed by a panel discussion of short forms, followed by refreshments and book signing by the three poets.