The Event

Local businesses will serve as venues for the display and performance of art created by over 100 regional and local artists. A large array of artwork will be showcased, including:

• 2D visual art
• music
• film
• poetry + prose

A variety of activities will occur throughout the afternoon, including activities geared toward entertaining and immersing children in art.

Handmade signs directing pedestrian traffic will mark the Art Walk route.

The location of the Art Walk is meant has special meaning to ReThink Topeka, which is a grassroots organization that seeks to enlighten Topekans and visitors about the positive aspects of the city.

“All the venues will emphasize the importance of downtown’s resurgence,” said Justin Marable, co-founder of ReThink Topeka. “Local eateries will provide refreshments at chosen venues, which will bring more local flavor to the event, stimulate the economy and produce an awareness of Topeka cuisine.”

The event is open to the public and asks for a $2 donation, which will give the attendee a handmade ReThink Topeka button and admission to all venues and activities.

Venues and Activities

• Break Room (911 S. Kansas Ave.): film, music and youth art. Food for sale by the Break Room. Youth/Adult activity: make a city collage with provided materials.
• Blue Planet Café (110 S.E. 8th Ave.): Artwork by regional artists, live music, readings and food provided by the Blue Planet Café. Youth/Adult activity: Linda Carson will do storytelling at 2, 4 and 5 p.m. Merchandise will be headquartered at Blue Planet, with ReThink Topeka shirts, chapbooks and Frisbees for sale.
  

  ReThink Topeka Chapbook for sale at the event

• Jayhawk Tower (700 Southwest Jackson St.): Artwork by regional artists, live music, readings and food provided by the Brickyard Barn Inn.  The Jayhawk Theatre will be conducting tours of the theater throughout the afternoon. Youth/Adult activity: cookie decorating.
• NexLynx (123 SW 6th Ave.): Artwork by regional artists will be on display. Youth/Adult activity: poetry workshop. Chapbooks featuring regional authors will be on sale at this location. Door prize provided by NexLynx.
• Supersonic Music (117 S.E. 6th Ave.): Local musicians will perform out front.  Youth/Adult activity: chalking
• Topeka Community Cycle Project (TCCP) (423 S. Kansas Ave.): Local craft and art group, the Craftavists have partnered with the TCCP to upcycle bike parts and materials in order to create handmade bicycle inspired art, which will be on display and for sale at this location
• Music, chalk drawing and other activities will line the sidewalks during the event.

For more information, visit www.rethinktopeka.com

[ April 2011 | press release | images provided by ReThink Topeka | cross-posted at xyztopeka.com ]

“Postcards from Home” is a collaborative show celebrating 150 years of Kansas’ statehood. Graphic artist Shanon Fouquet and writer Jeff Fouquet have created an exhibit that marries graphic illustrations featuring Kansas places with poetry. The birthday event marks the opening night of “Postcards.”

“The show is made of elements meant to appeal to multiple senses – the poetry, the art, the music and the activities are all aligned to create something closer to a momentary experience of a place through many senses,” said Jeff Fouquet.

Food will include the famous cold cuts, pickles and chili from Porubsky’s Deli and Tavern, and Dotte Cakes will provide birthday cake. Additional food, spirits and refreshments will be available.

Live poetry and music will include Jeff Fouquet’s poetic works about Kansas places and music from Topeka band Interior Sea. There will be a slide show of Kansas places, a place for people to decorate their own Kansas-shaped postcards and a huge outline of Kansas drawn on fabric in front of the stage so guests can label their favorite places and features, and share their Kansas memories and wishes for the future of the state.

Sponsors include Savor Kansas, Bartlett and West, Vision Bank, P.T.’s Coffee and Warehouse 414. The headlining sponsor, ReThink Topeka, is an organization that seeks to encourage citizens to find positive solutions that will breathe life back into the arts, culture and local economy of Topeka.

“We didn’t want the historic event on January 29th to pass without honoring our larger sense of place, so we pitched the idea, and ReThink threw its resources behind it,” said Jeff Fouquet. “They’re great, community-minded people with tons of positive energy, and they are proud to call themselves Kansans.”

The suggested cost for entrance to the party is $2 and purchases a button with a Topeka postcard image.

When the party concludes, the Fouquets hope that guests will take away a better understanding and appreciation for Kansas.

“They are going to visit places in Kansas they may never get the chance to be, and they will hear stories we can’t afford to let blow away in the wind,” said Shanon Fouquet. “We hope they see something new and something newly beautiful about our home state.”

[ Jan. 2011 | Press release | images courtesy Shanon Fouquet / Postcards from Home ]

I’ve been here for days.

The lever,
like the firm hand of someone’s father,
clicks into place.

I’ve been here for days,
it seems, before the water starts to flow—

a soft trickle, at first,
a whisper of piss, basically,
upon a symphony of flame.

My watch face is not visible
through the gloves, but
as the hose kicks finally to life

I can’t help but wonder
what time has just clicked,
firmly, into place.

I’ve been here for days,
in this desert.

Three-hundred sixty-three
to be exact.

And I can think
that this was someone’s house, or that
was where someone went to church—

but this is work,

to me,
that’s all it is.

This is a job I’ve gotten good at,
this is a body I’ve exhausted.

This fire, as it finally extinguishes
is just another clock I’m watching.

Justine’s Hands

Justine’s hands
sand down the details,
the rough paper smoothing
her edges unrecognizable.

It was early January,
some decade or another had just ended,

and I had spent
my fireworks budget
on cheap wine

which I would later spill
on so many cheap dresses, unsuccessfully.

Whenever I went to see Justine,
she was always working.

I would lurk in this corner, or that
the cobwebs and I, chit-chatting
idly in her general direction,

each of us equally ephemeral,
each of us equally likely
to become hopelessly entangled in her hair.

And all the smalltalk
I made there in her workshop
could not stop the big ideas
I had bursting in my brain,

like those fireworks I had forgotten to buy
would have probably done.

I had all this symbolic shit
I wanted to say to her
all this meaning I was desperate to impart
but I was just some guy, you know?

An interview with Timothy Volpert, by Dennis Etzel Jr.

785: Do you have a creative process? How do your poems come “to be?”

My poems usually tend to start with a single line (or image, but just most often just a single line with no context or anything), that I want to expand upon.  From there I just write and see what comes out, I suppose. Well, I guess I write in two stages: I start there, with the single line, and that I write by hand, then at some point I’ll type the poem up on my computer, and I edit while I’m typing. Editing is so important.
785: Your work has changed over the last few years. How would you describe that change?

Gosh, well, I guess I’d say it’s been a combination of how I’ve changed as a person and some conscious effort on my part to improve my writing and to hone my poetic voice.  The last few years of my life have been very full, to say the least, with both good experiences and bad. I’ve grown up a lot, I guess, and that reflects in the writing, I hope.  Also as I’ve continued to be exposed to more poets and writers, my vocabulary of influence has expanded–when I first started seriously writing poems, which was in high school, basically, my only real exposure to actual poetry was probably Edgar Allan Poe and A.A. Milne.  Since then I’ve gotten into the biggest influences of my life: Dylan Thomas, Jim Carroll, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, to name a few, and probably most importantly Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen–I’ve always been in love with that place where poetry and music intersect, and those two embody that so well.  Also, at some point my focus shifted to where every poem I write now, I write with the intention of reading aloud, and I usually do read them aloud, to myself, immediately after or during the writing process.  I feel like actually hearing it really helps filter out any awkward turns-of-phrase, or sounds that just don’t work in the poem, and for me poetry has always been foremost an attempt to create beautiful sounds.

785: You bring up two good points there–how poems have a certain sound to them, and that there is an association with music and poetry. I enjoy Smith and Cohen, too. I think there is a pop standard for lyrics to be devoid of metaphor or figurative language. What do you think about this?

Well, I agree that I think the standard for pop music is to be devoid of basically anything.  There are always two forces in music, the people who see it as a product and the people who see it as art.  Fortunately, the real artists are always out there doing what they do, it can just be harder to find sometimes.  But even within mainstream pop music there are some poetic gems to be found; Springsteen, for instance, is a pretty brilliant lyricist, and he’s one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Kanye West, for all his flaws, still drops a pretty impressive rhyme once in a while.

I’ll admit that I first came to poetry with a desire to write lyrics but no ability to write songs; along the way I also became enamored of poetry itself, and took a long detour down that road, before I just very recently came back to my original desire to play music and write songs (it helps that I finally had the time and focus to actually practice playing an instrument–turns out that helps a lot!), having been steeped for so long in pure poetry.

785: I think that is why lyric poetry is so dominant, and your poems seem to evoke the sense of the lyric. I truly enjoyed your persona poem “The Fireman.”  Have you experimented with persona? What other ways have you experimented in poems?

For a long time, I considered basically all of my poems to be persona poems. Even if that persona might seem to hew pretty close to my own personality, there was still a lot of element of fiction to it.  There still is quite a bit, but these days I allow myself to write something occasionally that is just purely me.  I was just really burnt out on confessional poetry for a long time, I wanted to tell other people’s stories, not just talk about myself.  But I’m also not a great storyteller, so I developed this style that I’ve always compared to those photographs where they zoom in so close that all you can see is the texture of an object, you can’t even tell what it is.  It’s so specific that it becomes vague.  “Justine’s Hands”, actually, was a specific attempt to zoom back out a little, to tell a story with a more concrete setting, and with two very distinct characters in a kind of real situation. And “The Fireman” is kind of another stab in that direction, but with a little more lyricism and abstraction mixed back in.  I’d say I kind of came at poetry the way, to some extent, I come to everything, which is to start off experimental, and work backwards from there, learning what rules I’d been breaking as I go along.

Also, I once wrote a poem by re-arranging clues from a crossword puzzle. It was better than I would’ve thought, but still not very good. The way crossword clues are phrased made everything end up sounding like newspaper headlines; there aren’t a lot of pronouns to work with.

785: I noticed hands also play a part in “Justine’s Hands.” I think hands are so personal. Do you find hands or other things coming up in poems? Do you see any other recurring themes in your work?

Hands are probably one, I think.  My band is called Paint Hands, in fact. Hands are the main way we interact with the physical world, so they have a lot of significance.  I find the word “listen” pops up a lot, which I think is both because it’s a beautiful word and because I like the idea of having that word built into a poem, especially if you are reading that poem aloud.  Another big theme for me is, I would say, the advancement of technology, and what that means to nature and our souls and all, but not in a completely negative way.  I’m pretty ambivalent about technology: on the one hand, I love all the information available from the internet, and the things it has made possible, but on the other hand there are a lot of legitimate concerns that the internet is just further detaching us all from each other,
from the rest of humanity.  If I were better at prose, I might write a lot of heavy-handed science fiction.  Other themes include death and relationships, you know, the usual.

[ July 2010 | Dennis Etzel Jr. | photo by Matt Porubsky ]
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Two doors down,
past the antique store
but before the florist,
in the watch repair
and jewelry shop,
sits a little lady
on a velvet-covered chair,
minding her manners,
ready to flutter
to her full height,
her ninety pounds
and beatific smile
whenever a customer
bings the bell.

Otherwise, she sleeps,
a little teapot
on a velvet-covered shelf.