Poet and performance artist Patrizia Longhitano hosts Venn Diagrams. She usually pairs poets whose work has no apparent connection and the audience discovers points of overlap. Experimental poetry films are also made and shown. Poets from the floor welcome.
This month there is a special Saturday Venn Diagrams - Un Nuevo Sol collaboration cohosted with Leo Boix with guest poet Francisco Aragón.
Poet, translator, essayist, editor, and San Francisco native Francisco Aragón studied Spanish at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. He earned an MA from the University of California at Davis and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame.
Exploring how language and genre both connect and diverge, Aragón’s poems locate personal experience within a wider cultural and historical conversation. Aragón’s debut poetry collection, Puerta del Sol (2005), appears in a bilingual edition, pairing poems originally composed in English with their Spanish-language “elaborations.” As Craig Santos Perez observed in his review for Jacket, “The poems in Francisco Aragón’s Puerta del Sol resemble gates of light as they capture the shifting hues of the poet’s experience living abroad in Spain and the memories of his native California.” In an interview with Connect Savannah, Aragón spoke of his writing process, noting, “Oftentimes I have the experience of sound or smell or song—some sort of sensory sensation jars some memory I thought had long been forgotten.”
