Brenda Sieczkowski & Eryn Green Reading for Ark Press this week!!

Brenda Sieczkowski & Eryn Green

(Thurs July 28--Fri July 29th)

Brenda Sieczkowski’s chapbook Wonder Girl in Monster Land is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.   She is currently working with Salt Lake’s chronically homeless and at-risk youth populations while she completes her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah.  She is also the Artist-in-Residence at the Salt Lake Community Writing Center.  Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and other hybrid-genre works have appeared in a wide variety of journals.

Check out Brenda’s “/ end notes /” at No Tell Motel.

Eryn Green’s poetry has appeared in Eclipse, the tiny, Bat City Review, H_NGM_N, Word for/ Word, Rhino, Iron Horse Review, Pheobe, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Denver Quarterly.  He holds an MFA from the University of Utah and he is currently pursuing his PhD in poetry at the University of Denver.

Check out Eryn’s “Bones” in H_NGM_N.

EVENTS/ SCHEDULE ::

Brenda Sieczkowski and Eryn Green will be reading at the Todd Mercantile Bakery Thurs, July 28^th at 7 pm. 

Brenda will be giving a talk entitled “The Spectacle of the Every Day” at the Todd Mercantile Bakery Fri, July 29^th at 7 pm.  Eryn will be giving a talk entitled “Poetry and Dictation: Jack Spicer and the Poet as Radio” immediately after.  

Joseph Wood Kicks Off the Ark Press Reading Series

On Thursday night our dear friend, Joseph Wood, kicked off Ark's Summer Reading Series.  After driving 11 hours from Tuscaloosa, Alabama the night before, Joseph read and talked about poems with a small but enthusiastic crowd at the Todd Mercantile and Bakery amidst the sound of pick-up trucks, tractors, riding lawn mowers and town dogs, staying late to talk with interested audience members (the range of topics I can remember include poetry, goats, farming and road construction). Later, at home, he whipped up a decadent meal consisting of at least three different kinds of fat and some asparagus.

Warm and endlessly generous, Joseph also insisted on making dinner for anyone who showed up for his talk about the space of belief in poetry the following night.

We are so grateful for his company and his commitment to poetry and community-making. It was a pleasure to have him in Todd this weekend.

You can check out Joseph's account of his visit as well as follow his ongoing exploration of poetry and daily life (among other things) here.

Inaugural Reading of the Summer Reading Series This Thursday, Talk Friday!

Joseph P. Wood 

(Thursday, July 14-Friday, July 15) 

Joseph P. Wood is the author of two full collections of poetry, Fold of the Map (Salmon Poetry Ltd., forthcoming) and I & We (CW Books, 2010), as well as five chapbooks, which include Gutter Catholic Love Song (Mitzvah Chaps, 2010), and In What I Have Done & Failed to Do (Elixir Press, 2006), which won the Elixir Press Chapbook Prize. His poems and reviews have been published widely in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, BOMB, Boston Review, diode, Gently Read Literature, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi, RealPoetik, Verse, West Branch, among others. He's held residencies at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and at Artcroft. 

Wood teaches creative writing, English and American literature, and composition at The University of Alabama. In 2009, he co-founded The Slash Pine Projects (Slash Pine Press), an undergrad internship that focuses on immersion learning and community arts. Students take leadership positions in chapbook production and promotion, community arts event planning (whose yearly highlight is The Slash Pine Writers' Festival), grant writing, fundraising, mini-documentaries of poetry performance, technology and the arts, among a dozen other fluid projects. 

Wood will be reading at the Todd Mercantile Bakery Thursday, July 14th at 7:00 pm. 

He will give a talk entitled "The Poem and Ecumenical Humanism" at the Todd Mercantile Bakery, Friday, July 15th at 7:00 pm and will be co-hosting a creative writing workshop immediately after. 

Find a sample of his work here and here.

Ark Press Summer Reading Series & Workshop (2011) Schedule ::

Come on out!!  Readings, talks, and workshops free and open to the public.

Interests & talismans ::

John Cage/ writing good not well/ HD Thoreau’s “Higher Laws”/ Wm Blake’s Illuminated Manuscripts/ Polis/ “savage names”/ compost/ “Organic Form”/ John Coltrane/ Evan Williams/ Gertie Stein/ Days in the Wake/ “soul-making”/ Soul music/ process/ TV/ Laurel and Hardy/ Lightnin’ Hopkins/ Townes Van Zandt/ “the word was made good from the start” (CD Wright)/ Sentences/ Tim Hecker/ fiddle music/ the fact that Bugs Bunny always takes a wrong turn at Albuquerque on the way to Pismo Beach and goes on to have other adventures/ Lyn Hejinian: “A pause/ a rose/ something on paper”/ Ruskin’s second “everlasting law”/ river-life/ “THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THIS MOMENT”/ This passage from Huck Finn: "It's lovely to live on a raft.  We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened."/ “Music = no music” (no music = music)/ JJ Rousseau’s The Reveries of the Solitary Walker/ D Wordsworth/ Chainsaw art/ J Clare’s “The Nightingale’s Nest”/ nests (in general)/ songbirds/ Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s finches/ Robert Smithson/ Robert Creeley/ Guy Davenport’s sense that “a change in attention is a change in culture”/ Hank Williams/ Christmas lights/ Being alone together/ melodies and harmonies/ M Rowlandson: “I was alone and God was with me”/ Son House: “The blues is by its own self”/ Francesca Woodman/ Susan Howe/ Mountains x 2/ “My mother is a fish”/ thrift store records/ L = A = N = U = A = G = E is fossil poetry/ Burn barrels/ paper/ cinderblocks/ block prints/ Jen Bervin/ our hometowns/ your hometowns/ cemeteries/ gardens/ the visionary/ Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell duets (especially, “If This World Were Mine”)/ broken fences/ ditches bursting with cattails/ “Opposition is true Friendship”/ R Blaser: “Companions are/ horizons”/ cooking/ getting Christine drunk enough to sing/ Jasper Johns/ Virgil’s shepherds/ Bob Dylan/ Will Oldham/ Shit that falls apart/ Shit that’s just about to fall apart and doesn’t/ C Coolidge’s Space/ coffee/ tinder/ horses/ Jonathan Edwards/ Robert Johnson postcards/ “THE WORLD IS CHARGED WITH THE GRANDEUR OF GOD./ IT WILL FLAME OUT.”/ “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYxpSjkyAg (“An American is a complex of occasions.”  (Amen.)/ Niedecker/ yellow then purple/ jadite/ kitchen/ ahimsha/ salt/ bread/ eggs/ fall then snow then green; then tiger lilies/ letterpress/ herons/ plant & turn/ a field/ fluttering laundry/ birch paper/ that high lonesome sound/ innocence perforated by experience makes way for roadside flowers/ Dog is an anagram for God and our dog only wants to play ball the moment that we sit down to do something else/ seeds (atoms)/ fireworks/ fuzz pedals/ distortion/ amplification/ rust/ weather “the news,” etc./ Getting born again (and again and again)/ Milton’s Satan: “Myself am Hell”/ EP dragged through the wasted edge of his agency and reborn in love at Pisa: “Nothing counts save the quality of the affection”/ torn envelopes/ clippings/ cut-ups/ green glass/ ATTENTION!/ Rimbaud (via Donald Revell): “it began with the laughter of children; it will end there” / Jack Spicer’s “Imaginary Elegies”/ the mysteries of small houses/ The Poetics of Space/ drift wood/ Midnight Orchard/ morning stars/  loose change shining on the carpet/ W Whitman: “I stop somewhere waiting for you”