Poetry Reading: Larry Beckett and Marc Zegans

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland poet Larry Beckett for an in-store reading from his new collection, The Book of Merlin. Larry will be joined by California poet Marc Zegans, whose latest collection is Lyon Street.

About The Book of Merlin:

Merlin was a 6th-century poet in northwest Britain, who spoke the Brythonic tongue. He was known as Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin of the Wilds. He was a contemporary and comrade of Taliesin, and though The Book of Taliesin is extant, for Merlin, there are only a handful of poems in The Black Book of Carmarthen, The Red Book of Hergest, and other middle Welsh texts. But scholars have suggested that Merlin's other lyrics were embedded in the Latin poem Vita Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Together, they tell of Merlin's later life. This translation is the first time that his surviving words have been gathered in one manuscript since The Book of Merlin was lost in the 12th century.

Larry Beckett's poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. Beat Poetry is a study of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance.

About Lyon Street:

Lyon Street is a love letter to a perpetually reincarnating city that often fails to remember itself. Reading Lyon Street, says novelist David Scott Ewers, is to imbibe "a San Francisco of the Mind." This art piece's linked poems, playing as jazz solos over common changes, evocative artwork, street map design, and playfully archival elements conjure a San Francisco in which past and possibility provocatively entwine. Its poems animate a more dangerous, often tragic, yet truly gentle San Francisco lost, reckon with seismic shifts in this forgetful place, and come to embrace the enduring openness of life at Pacific's edge.

Marc Zegans is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative development advisor who helps artists, writers and creative people thrive and shine. Marc is the author of four collections of poems, The Book of Clouds, Boys in the Woods, The Underwater Typewriter, and Pillow Talk, an e-book, Intentional Practice and the Art of Finding Natural Audience, and two spoken word albums, Marker and Parker, with the late jazz pianist Don Parker, and Night Work. He has been the Narragansett Beer Poet Laureate and a Poetry Whore with the New York Poetry Brothel—which Time Out New York described as "New York's Sexiest Literary Event," and has performed everywhere from the Bowery Poetry Club and the American Poetry Museum to the San Francisco 40th Anniversary of Punk Rock Renaissance.