Dear Friends of Poetry,
The Poetry Night Reading Series is excited to feature an evening with renowned Polish poet Kacper Bartczak at 7 PM on Thursday, October 3rd, 2024, on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis.
KACPER BARTCZAK is a Polish poet, scholar, and translator. Recent poetry volumes include Czas Kompost [Time Compost] (2023), Widoki wymazy (2021), Naworadiowa [Radionaves] (2019), Pokarm suweren [Food Sovereign] (2017), and Wiersze organiczne [Organic Poems] (2015). He has translated and published volumes of poetry by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, and Peter Gizzi. and many other poets into Polish. In English translation, his poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Berlin Quarterly, Aufgabe, Jacket2, and Lyric. He is an associate professor and department chair at the University of Łódź.
Translator Mark Tardi said this about Bartczak in the March, 2024 Poetry Magazine: “Across numerous poetry collections, Polish poet, translator, and critic Kacper Bartczak has produced a distinctive poetic style that largely eschews punctuation and builds torque with conjoined phrasal shards and pressurized syntax only for the reader to slip on leaky alliteration or consonance. His recent trio of books—Wiersze organiczne (Organic Poems), Pokarm Suweren (Food Sovereign), and Naworadiowa (Radionaves)—explore on geological and molecular levels the cultural dynamics that have fed contemporary Polish political discourse and reality. For Bartczak, the material substance of our world—minerals, plants, residual tissues, organic and inorganic matter—is haunted by the psychological, feeds the alchemical dangers of a sort of mitochondrial misprision to express its apprehensions, superstitions, and dark energies.”
Tardi continues: “Bartczak creates multivalent poetic organisms with ‘breath smoother than phosphate’ that are fueled by ‘the synthetic maniac given/under the tongue for thought//life glued into someone’s/dream.’ His syllables are sharp enough to slice meat while ‘synergistic parabolas/are like magnetic flowers’ that extend Polish literary talisman Miron Białoszewski’s Copernican ‘revolution of things’ into posthumanist poetic roses capable of ‘vaporiz[ing] the void.’”
This event will take place on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery (521 1st Street in Davis) at 7 PM on Thursday, October 3rd, 2024. An open mic will follow the featured performers. Open mic performances will be limited to four minutes or two items, whichever is shorter. As Cicero says, “Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.” The open mic list typically fills by 6:45 PM, so please arrive early if you would like to perform something during the 8 o’clock hour. Attendees who request to be added to the list after 7 PM will be invited to try again at a subsequent event.
Find the Facebook event for this much anticipated evening of poetry at https://www.facebook.com/events/1289629125340126
The Poetry Night Reading Series, taking place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, by Thea and the other members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery, and by Michael Gallowglas and others who come early or stay late to help with the chairs. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.
Find out more about the Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting https://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, check out his weekly podcast at https://poetrytechnology.buzzsprout.com/.
Upcoming Events:
October 3rd: Kacper Bartczak
October 17th: Tim Hunt
November 7: Julia Levine and Murray Silverstein
Please Google any of these poets to discover their many poetic accomplishments. Additional future readers will include Julia Connor, Katie Peterson, Clarence Major, and other favorites.
The Poetry Night Reading Series has been committed to serving the literary and arts community in the city of Davis since 2006. Happening every 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month at the Natsoulas Gallery, each reading contains two featured poets followed by an open mic. Poetry in Davis was voted “Best Open Mic” in The California Aggie’s “Best of Davis″ edition and has been featured in Davis Life Magazine. The more than 375 featured poets have included UC Davis faculty Francisco X. Alarcón, John Boe, Zinzi Clemmons, Joshua Clover, Jack Forbes, Sandra Gilbert, Laurie Glover, Brad Henderson, Pamela Houston, Andy Jones, Clarence Major, Sandra McPherson, Maceo Montoya, Katie Peterson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Ronda, Joe Wenderoth, and Alan Williamson, as well as many regional and traveling poets, including Molly Peacock, Jane Hirshfield, Dana Gioia, and James Ragan.
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