Poets from across Oregon will gather to share their recent work at an event presented by the Manzanita Writers’ Series, at 4 p.m. April 13 at Hoffman Center for the Arts.

At the event, which is being organized by the Portland nonprofit publisher Airlie Press, the winners of the 2025 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize will read their poems. This includes first-place winner David Pickering, second-place winner Kitt Patten, third-place winner Logan Garner and honorable mentions Ruby Hansen Murray and Phyllis Mannan.

This annual contest kicks off each January, when poets with connections to the North Coast submit their work. The first-place winner receives a cash prize and — with the second- and third-place winners — have their poems published on the Hoffman Center website. They also participate in the Airlie Press event, which celebrates the launch of new collections from the press.

The two featured Airlie poets this year are Daneen Bergland and Irene Cooper. “The press is always evolving,” Bergland said. “We have different aesthetics and different styles and different perspectives coming in.”

Past editors have had connections to Manzanita and the press has a long relationship with Cloud & Leaf Bookstore.

For Bergland and Cooper, this will be the first time presenting at the event, although Bergland attended last year to help. Both are reading from their recently completed works, published through the press. 

 

Book of dreams

Hailing from the Midwest, Bergland moved to Oregon in the 1990s. She now lives in Portland, where she works as a professor at Portland State University. She is in the third year of her term as a co-editor for Airlie Press. 

As the second year is when the co-editors get to work on their poetry collections, she feels like Cooper’s works are “sister books,” in a way, being completed alongside one another.

However, Bergland had been working on her book, “The Goodbye Kit,” for many years: writing, rewriting, reordering. She was simply looking for a place for it to land.

Craving group collaboration, and feeling prepared as a volunteer editor at Airlie Press, she submitted work during their open reading period and was selected. 

“It was a book, it felt like a book, but it became a better book because I had these other poets and editors to help,” Bergland said. “It really is exactly the book I always hoped I would publish. I’m so proud of it.”

Her book explores themes of loss and change in various contexts, with a particular emphasis on aging and motherhood. Additionally, it explores wider ideas of loss around climate change and extinction.

She uses imagery surrounding the biblical Garden of Eden and Eve, with a few poems written in the voice of that character. Overall, she adds, the collection is “lush with animals and plants and flowers.”

“Some of the poems sort of play around with the idea of marriage and what if we thought about our relationship to the natural world as a marriage,” she said.

She’s loved poetry since she was a child. Her particular draw to the medium is that “it’s about the words.”

“You get to do so much with them,” she said, adding they have their connotations and denotations, but they’re also sonic. “Poetry uses words almost in the same way that music uses notes. I love that you’re playing around with words in all those ways.” 

 

‘Big emotions’

As for Cooper — who grew up in New York and made her way to central Oregon by way of Texas, Nevada and California — her book, titled “Even My Dreams are Over the Constant State of Anxiety,” is not her first published work. 

She’s also written two novels, as well as critical reviews, nonfiction essays, and another poetry collection, “Spare Change,” which was an Oregon Book Award finalist. Residing in Bend, she also teaches in a master’s of fine arts program at Oregon State University-Cascades and at Central Oregon Community College.

The themes that appeal to Cooper, which are woven throughout her work, include body autonomy, the climate crisis, and “all the things that cause these contemporary anxieties.” 

She likes to incorporate plenty of wordplay and humor into her work, which isn’t always common.  

“It’s tough to work with irony in poetry, because it’s generally a pretty sincere art,” she said. “One of the great gifts of poetry is that you can achieve beauty and emotional depth without having to answer the question. You can hold, or contain, these big emotions that don’t give themselves to language, but give themselves to feeling. Poetry is the thing that holds the feeling.”

Both authors look forward to reading in Manzanita.

“When you’re writing anything, you’re thinking about your reader — sometimes,” Bergland said. “But to really be in the same space as them and have your writing be more of a performance, it’s really fun to have that interaction.”

“The one time I’ve thus far been in the area, I’m always touched by how engaged the community is and supporting places like the Hoffman Center,” Cooper added.

She also is interested to hear how people are sustaining art in their lives, and if they’re looking more toward the arts to process current events. “I’m looking forward to talking to the crowd,” she said.