POG
presents
poets Mark Salerno and Keith Wilson
Saturday, May 24, 7pm
MOCA
(Museum of Contemporary Art)
191 E. Toole Ave. (NW corner of Toole 6th Ave, downtown)
Admission: $5; Students $3
Mark Salerno was born in New York in 1956. He lives in Hollywood, where he edits Arshile: A Magazine of the Arts. His books of poetry include Hate (96 Tears Press, Los Angeles 1995) and Method (The Figures, Great Barrington, MA 2002). The poet C.D. Wright says of the poetry in Method:
If these pieces / glimpses / points in review could be molded into popular songs (happily they resist) I'd buy every cd. Method is a spoken nightscape, a starry, commiserating agent between Bronk and Creeley, a dry-eyed testimonial of ambivalent standing between our incurable existential awareness and bottomless communal longing. Salerno puts a clearheaded list of key words in circulation and returns to us a plenary of mostly single-sentence poems, a calvacade of impeccably broken lines, not forgetting the invisible crack in everything. What little caviling goes on is directed at the poet acaviling. He is, in all modesty and honesty, "just doing his job"—insuring that what we really think, and what we actually say, is a tight fit.
Keith Wilson, professor emeritus and former New Mexico State University poet-in-residence, was born on the Llano Estacado. He grew up in Fort Sumner, Deming, Carlsbad, Alamogordo, Portland, Ore., and Albuquerque. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of New Mexico. He is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry including Midwatch, When Dancing Feet Shatter the Earth, Stone Roses, Lion’s Gate, Graves Registry, and Homestead. Wilson has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Border Book Festival, a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a D.H. Lawrence Creative Fellowship, a Senior Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship, a P.E.N. America Writing Grant, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in Literature, and New Mexico State University’s Westhafer Award. His most recent book, Transcendental Studies, published by Tucson’s Chax Press, will be available to the public for the first time at this reading. Robert Creeley writes of this book,
This dear book is fact of a long practised care and the wisdom which at last lets it go. Here are poems as intimate as breathing, recognitions quick as a lizard’s moving in the sudden sun. Back of it all is the abiding love for those one’s lived a life with. May this circle forever be unbroken.
POG events are sponsored in part by grants from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. POG also benefits from the continuing support of The University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Arizona Quarterly, Chax Press, and The University of Arizona Department of English. We also thank the following POG donors: Patrons Roberta Howard, Tenney Nathanson, Liisa Phillips, Austin Publicover, and Frances Sjoberg; Sponsors Barbara Allen, Chax Press, Alison Deming, The Jim Click Automotive Team, Elizabeth Landry, Stefanie Marlis, Stuart and Nancy Mellan, Sheila Murphy Associates, and Tim Peterson; Silent Auction Partner Zia Records.
for further information contact POG: 615-7803; pog@gopog.org; www.gopog.org