Workshops
Let’s Read Larry Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze Together!
A Reading & Discussion Workshop
I imagine most poets have that One Writer, the writer who most pivotally inspired dedication to poetry. Larry Levis is that writer for me. He visited my college when I was nineteen & gave a reading that shook open & widened my notions of the scope & work of poetry. I find his work both embracing & challenging, playfully expansive & desperately reaching toward some true human connection in an all-too-often too-inhuman world.
And OK, to be honest, The Darkening Trapeze, as a book: it’s a bit of a mess. How could it not be? It was collected & edited by Levis’s bestie David St. John decades after Levis’s death. The poems are often maybe-finished, & arranged in an order the author never envisioned. It is a labor of love for an old friend. I value the book, but because of this mess, I’d skipped it when I ran a workshop reading Levis’s books.
Now I find myself wanting to bring people together to discuss The Darkening Trapeze. Partially, as a completist gesture—I so deeply benefited from those discussions of Levis’s work, & I want to continue that as far as I can. But more than that, I want to lean into the mess The Darkening Trapeze allows us access to, to discuss the mess together, the wonder & the incongruities of trying to record what remains of an artist’s life cut off at peak artistic ability; to see what we see together in these poems, & through discussion & connection, arrive somewhere we could not have done so alone.
While some participants will have a working knowledge of Levis’s poetry, you’re also welcome if you’re new to his work & looking for an entry to it, & also welcome if you’ve never heard of Levis & are just looking for a few hours of dedicated & heartfelt group discussion of poetry. The primary goals of all the reading workshops I lead are to think about & discuss poetry in a non-academic & accepting setting, to welcome profundity & silliness & idiosyncratic personal engagements equally; & to foster a temporary community of like-minded weirdos in pursuit of some knowing-beyond-knowledge that poetry can allow a reader to perceive, or at least to believe is possible.
When: Sunday, June 2nd: 5-8:30pm EST
Where: the Zooms
To register: email me mathias.svalina at gmail
Sliding scale: $0-50
vnmo: Mathias-Svalina / pypal: MathiasSvalina