Beatrice Szymkowiak, Katie Berta, J-T Kelly, Tom Jenks + Cary Fagan : virtual reading series #32

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Beatrice Szymkowiak : Three poems from B/RDS

Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French-American writer and scholar. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Red Zone (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a poetry chapbook, as well as the winner of the 2017 OmniDawn Single Poem Broadside Contest, and the recipient of the 2022 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her full-length collection B/RDS, published by the University of Utah Press in 2023. Her work also has appeared in numerous poetry magazines.

Katie Berta : “Like That” and “Birthday”

Katie Berta’s debut poetry collection, retribution forthcoming, won the Hollis Summers Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Bennington Review, among other magazines. She has received residencies from Millay Arts, Ragdale, and The Hambidge Center, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award. She is the managing editor of The Iowa Review and teaches literary editing at the University of Iowa and poetry at Arizona State University.

J-T Kelly : “Crossing,” “Keeping House,” and “West”

J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis. He lives in a brick house with his wife and their six children. He is the author of the chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023).

Tom Jenks : from Melamine

Tom Jenks is a UK poet and text artist. Melamine, a sequence of 8 line poems, will be published by The Red Ceilings in 2024. Details of his other books and his artwork can be found at https://tomjenks.uk. He edits zimzalla, a small press specialising in literary objects, details of which can be found at https://zimzalla.co.uk.

Cary Fagan : “Any Moment Now”

Cary Fagan is the author of eight novels and five story collections, most recently The Animals (book*hug). He has also written many novels and picture books for children.  His next book is a collection of stories called A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News.

Cary Fagan : On Fifty-Two Lines About Henry

 

 

 

 

 

In early 2021 I was missing the pleasure of writing in cafés.  And so I went down to the basement, found some plywood and a 2x4 and some dark stain, and built myself a little table.  I put it in the corner of my small study, on a little rug, beside a photograph of two dogs wrestling, one looking into the camera, in a forlorn rural landscape. (Many decades ago, as editorial assistant on the Canadian Forum, I was given the task of returning unsolicited artwork from an overflowing file.  The photograph had no name or address attached and so I kept it.). Here was my own little spot, which I named the Lonesome Dog Café.

The table wasn’t large enough for a computer but only for a manuscript and pen or a notebook.  Wanting to inaugurate it with some new bit of writing, I opened a fresh notebook and sat there wondering what to write.  I don’t remember how I came up with the idea of writing individual sentences to capture a character but after that first session I decided that I would try and write five sentences about “Henry” every day.  I had no design or plan, no sense at the start of who Henry might be, nor even the tone that I was hoping for. Very quickly he became this rather hapless, naïve man with grandiose and unrealistic plans and a flawed understanding of other humans. Many of the lines seemed rather comic to me, although I wasn’t trying for humour. Perhaps comic in an uneasy way.  I didn’t overthink it; I just let the lines come.

If I could put my hands on the notebook, I could tell you how many lines I wrote in the end.  Just under ninety, I think.  Later I typed them on my laptop, revising along the way.  And over time I played with the lines, adding a very few, cutting out more, changing the order, until I finally arrived at Fifty-Two Lines About Henry. Not poetry, or a short story, at least to me.  Just its own modest thing, a small portrait of a dreamy, mildly deluded man who, if life is kind, won’t do too much harm to himself or anyone else.

 

 

 

 

Cary Fagan’s first chapbook was published in an edition of six copies, all typed by him.  Some forty years later he is a co-editor of the chapbook house, espresso.  He also publishes books for adults and kids, most recently The Animals (Book*Hug).  He lives in Toronto.