On Thursday, January 16, at 7pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature Berkeley, California poet Jake Spertus.

The reading will take place at Think Visual Gallery, located at 240 Main Street in Point Arena. Doors open at 7pm, event begins at 7:15pm. Bring something to sit on, something to eat and/or drink (if you want!), your words, music and ears!! The reading will begin with live improv jazz, followed by a featured reading with the musicians accompanying Spertus, then an open mic with jazz improv, and finally the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.

Jake Spertus was born in Seattle in 1993. They grew up between Kansas City and a small sheep farm in Northwest Missouri, where they would disappear into the woods at chore-time. In 2011, they left Missouri for the pines and broken shore of Maine, where they went to college for math. After graduating, they pent themself up for a while in Boston working in healthcare policy research. In 2018 they escaped to California to begin a PhD in statistics at UC Berkeley.

That same year they began writing poetry as solace for a grim political present, a balm for homesickness, and a counterweight to the rationalism and rigid structure that characterized their graduate studies. They wrote for 4 years before releasing the chapbook. Millenarianism in the Spring of 2023. This past fall, they were a resident artist at the Winslow House Project in Vallejo, focusing on poetry and visual art. They have read at Medicine for Nightmares in San Francisco, at the release of Millenarianism in Berkeley, and at the Winslow House in Vallejo.

Jake’s poetry is concerned with mystery and knowledge, relationships between people and with land, the subtle hauntings of power and violence, and the presence of voids great and small. Their poems are informed by their upbringing in Missouri, as much as by their persistent wandering. The poems often express both a hunger for the imagined coziness of Home–both metaphorical and literal–and a suspicion towards the moral and existential perils of settlement. The poems are interested in how different forms of abstraction–words, numbers, images, data–contribute to our experiences and to the construction of our ideologies. They are particularly attentive to how sound, form, and imagery shape the feeling or meaning of verse.

Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz is supported by The Third Thursday Poetry Group, anonymous supporters, and Poets & Writers, Inc.

October Drizzle

A sudden drizzle beads the leaves,
And October
Rises off to atmosphere.

You call this “Autumn”?
I hardly care. I only enjoy
How mist saturates the ferns like reverb,

And that when I touch
The wet shell of the redwood
I sense centuries of resilience.

Is this that wretched “Destiny” so many tried to seek?
Is it the unstruck seam?
The tree won’t say. Not here.

But a clear blood rushes to each leaf
And I feel what reaches back past words
And retraces long curves to the taproot:

An ancient braid of earth and ether,
Sutured through the throbbing Wound, ‘
Here now and here forever.

Jake Spertus