Elizabeth Arnold & Patrick Hartigan

Sunday, November 12th
7:30 pm

New American Art Union
922 SE Ankeny Street

$5 suggested donation

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Elizabeth Arnold grew up in northeast Florida and attended Oberlin
College and the University of Chicago. She is presently on the faculty
at the Warren Wilson and University of Maryland MFA programs. Arnold has
received a Whiting Writer’s Award and fellowships from the Fine Arts
Work Center and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Radcliffe. Her
poems and essays have appeared in Slate, TriQuarterly,
Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Pequod, and Antioch Review. She
discovered a complete, unpublished manuscript of the British poet Mina
Loy’s novel, Insel, which she edited for Black Sparrow Press in 1991.
Her first book of poems, The Reef, was published in 1999 by the
University of Chicago Press. Her second, Civilization, appears this
September from Flood Editions.

Patrick Hartigan lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Endi, and son,
Jackson. He adds: "I have found that this statement is my one, true
biographical statement—that it does not state anything that either I,
my friends, or a disinterested reader would take exception to."

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AT K’AXOB

In the first millennium BCE, in present-day Belize, a man
maybe in a dazed state after dinner, or in the morning, half-awake

saw how the objects in a room look different

from the doorway, say, or from the floor,
the house completely empty now, the air inside it still

so that perspective, once shifted, if only from a slightly tilted chin,

breathed the space alive. The man stood up and felt the difference,
built a platform, a little stage inside the room.

The pyramids came after that.

—Elizabeth Arnold

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Rockaway Visit

Look at the green all
this green the forest
is so green. Look how
green a forest can be

See the sky over seas
green and blue my eye
catches sky over seas
green or blue & green

Look at his face this
boy this look at this
face this man or look
at the trees the seas

—Patrick Hartigan