Blog
From Masquerades to Motherhood: Poet and Interdisciplinary Artist Natasha Marin
Seattle based poet and interdisciplinary artist Natasha Marin sat down with TPR Director Tia Kramer to discuss how Trinidadian masquerades, Canadian friendliness, and motherhood influences her work.
Read MorePhotograph by Christopher Felver
Denise Levertov was a great 20th century American poet who lived in Seattle from 1989 until her death in 1997. A convert to Catholicism, she wrote about faith, nature and the environment, politics and social justice.
Author Rebecca Brown, Poet Jan Wallace, and The Project Room will host this evening remembering Levertov by introducing her work, screening short films about her and sharing audio and video clips of Levertov reading.
Breathing The Water is part of a city-wide celebration of Levertov which culminates May 16th, Seattle's official Denise Levertov Day. Join the final celebration on May 16, 2015, when Coral Arts, a vocal ensemble in residence at St. Joseph Church where Levertov was a parishioner, will present the world premiere of a setting of Levertov's poem "Making Peace." St. Joseph is also sponsoring the city-wide celebration of Levertov's legacy as poet, activist, and woman of faith. Concert tickets are available through Choral Arts.
Read more about Levertov in TPR's recent Off Paper Essay, "Bearing Witness" by Jan Wallace. Information about additional Levertov events online. Special thanks to Levertov event sponsors:
April 27 Introducing Levertov, St James Cathedral, 7 PM
May 4 Levertov films, The Project Room, 1315 E Pine, 6 PM
May 5 Homage to Levertov reading, Sorrento Hotel, 7 PM
May 7 Introducing Levertov, St Joseph Parish Center, 7 PM
May 9 Levertov gravesite visit, Lake View Cemetery, 11 AM
May 14 Levertov evening, Elliot Bay Bookstore, 7 PM
May 16 Choral Arts concert, St Joseph Church, 8 PM
preceded by preconcert conversation, 7:30 PM
Reception, St Joseph Parish Center, 6:15 PM
City of Seattle declares May 16 Denise Levertov Day
Rebecca Brown. Photo by Andrea Auge
Rebecca Brown is a writer, teacher and literary activist. She is the author of seven novels, including The End of Youth, The Terrible Girls, and What Keeps Me Here, and her short stories are widely anthologized. Her novel The Gifts of the Body won a Lambda Literary Award and has been translated into several languages. Brown divides her time between Seattle and Vermont, where she is a faculty member in the Master of Fine Arts program at Goddard College.
Jan Wallace, poet and essayist, was a dear friend of Denise Levertov's. Her poems currently appear in Terrain, A Journal of Built and Natural Environments. Her work has also appeared in ARCADE, Fine Madness, Field and other journals. Read Jan's recent essay about Levertov, "Bearing Witness" in TPR's online journal, Off Paper.
Exploring the parallels between the scientific method and divination with Artist Sierra Nelson.
Performance Artist and Poet Sierra Nelson invites us into a conversation questioning the roles divination, science, and artistic practice play in our understanding of the past and choices for the future. She’ll be joined by her longtime collaborator Rachel Kessler to bookend the conversation with some live experiments.
Photography by Rebecca Hoogs
Photograph by Rebecca Hoogs
Poet, performer, and text-based artist Sierra Nelson (co-founder of The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society) is author of lyrical choose-your-own-adventure I Take Back the Sponge Cake (Rose Metal) made with visual artist Loren Erdrich and chapbook “In Case of Loss” (Toadlily Press). Earning her MFA in Poetry from U.W. (2002), she is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and Carolyn Kizer Prize winner, and she teaches in Seattle, Friday Harbor, and Rome, Italy.
On the divination side, she has written poems inspired by the patterns in tarot, created an interactive poetry installation inspired by Nordic runes using Icelandic lava stones ("Runasafn: Rune Library"), and most recently she has written a new interactive manuscript of poems, "I Change," inspired by the 8 elements in the ancient Chinese divination system the I Ching (a.k.a. The Book of Changes).
On the science side, she has written scientifically-vetted poems about fish in collaboration with ichthyologist Adam Summers' "Cleared" photographs of stained fish skeletons, both of which debuted at the Seattle Aquarium; she teaches and works with scientists at U.W.'s Friday Harbor Labs in the San Juan Islands; and science is a core inspiration for her performance and installation work as the Vis-à-Vis Society collaborating with Rachel Kessler under their poet-scientist personas, Dr. Ink and Dr. Owning.
Photograph by Rebecca Hoogs
Rachel Kessler (co-founder of The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society) is a poet and essayist who works with comics, video, installation, and performance art. Her work has appeared in Open Daybook, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, The Stranger, The Frye Art Museum and elsewhere. She works as a teaching artist with Writers in the Schools, Path with Art, Richard Hugo House, and Centrum.
Sierra and Rachel have been collaborating for over 17 years.
