Vigo County Public Library
7th & Poplar
Terre Haute, Indiana
812-232-1113
April 19
Brown Bag Program: 12:10 p.m.
Main Library
Poetry Month Brown Bag: Poems of Art and the Living Past
The Light of the Common Day: A Poetry Reading by Matt Brennan for Poetry Month
Celebrate Poetry Month at the Vigo County Public Library at the April 19 Brown Bag at 12:10 pm
featuring Matt Brennan. Do you know what ekphrasis is? Learn and hear examples at this interesting
program.
Matt Brennan
In the summer of 2011, Brennan received an Indiana Arts Commission grant to write poems about the art of the 1930s, as well as poems about travel. He spent three weeks in Columbus, Ohio studying and writing about works in the Philip and Suzanne Schiller Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, and also art works from the ISU WPA collection. This group of poems forms a sequel to a series of WPA-inspired poems that appears in The House with the Mansard Roof (Backwaters Press, 2009) and the chapbook, The Light of Common Day (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Three of the newer poems are examples of ekphrasis -- poems that directly treat the content and form of art works -- whereas the fourth, Jam Session by Fred Becker, uses the print as a launch into a lyrical narrative about his grandfather, who played jazz in Europe in the 1920s. The travel-related poems also extend motifs begun in the recent chapbook. One of the older poems describes a river cruise on the Rhine River and three newer works are similarly set in Germany and Austria, including "Nightingales." Another is set in the Lake District of England, "In Bed at the Churchill Hotel, Ambleside." The title for the grant is "Souvenir," as all the poems center on the power of art and poetry to fix the past, for remembrance and reconstruction.