On Thursday, May 18, at 7:30pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series at 215 Main in Point Arena will feature West Marin poet Brian Kirven. The reading will begin with live improv jazz and an open mic with jazz improv; the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
Brian Kirven is a published poet, poetry and Spanish teacher and radio announcer who has lived in West Marin for twenty years. He received his B.A. in Film Writing from San Francisco State University, and holds Masters of Arts in Spanish from Sonoma State University and the University of Granada, Spain.
His work has appeared in The Bolinas Hearsay News, The Kerf, Iron Springs Review, California Quarterly, Inverness Almanac, San Diego Annual and others. A California Poet in the Schools from West Marin elementary schools to Marin Juvenile Hall, Brian has also been a radio programmer on the music and spoken word oriented program “Learning Curve” on KWMR radio in Point Reyes Station, California. A great many poets have appeared on his program, including David Meltzer, Jane Hirschfield, Brenda Hillman and Clark Coolidge.
Brian has organized Spanish-language ROAR (“Reach Out and Read”) poetry readings in West Marin, and in 2005-6 he helped coordinate a quarterly community poetry series at Point Reyes Books. He has made multiple appearances to read at Stockstill House, a home for seniors in Point Reyes Station. In addition, Brian brought the poetry translation educational program Poetry Inside Out, as part of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco, to West Marin School for five years.
Brian is the author of Shorelines: A Traveler Comes Home to the Tide Zone, a book of poems and poetic prose inspired by waterways that explores the overlap between long, open-ended travels and his residence in a house over Tomales Bay in Marshall, California, where he landed in West Marin in 1996 after traveling the length and width of the Americas by motorcycle.
Of Shorelines, ex Marin poet laureate Prartho Sereno writes: “Poet and world-traveler Brian Kirven invites us on the unsettling journey of staying put. Vowing to “see one place with freshly changing perspectives,” he stays home—which, lucky for us, means wandering some of the most stunning wild coastline of the Pacific Rim. Kirven is fiercely total in his quest, his vision trained on what is real and true. And in his presence we find the courage to give ourselves to our own “inward swimming seas.” These sometimes playful, sometimes starkly beautiful poems deliver us to a world “born of sea and fire and sand and sapphire,” where mysterious clues are revealed—the little fish at our feet, for example, turn out to be “liquid shooting stars.”
Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, many anonymous donors, and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.
