Denver Butson, Mat Maneri, and Lucian Ban: Poetry and Improvised Music

Please join the Department of English and the Creative Writing Fund for an event in Rogers Memorial Chapel with Denver Butson as he presents a suite of his poems in collaboration with the free improvisation of violist Mat Maneri and pianist Lucian Ban, who mix traditional Romanian music with avant-garde jazz and other forms.

This event is free and open to the public. 

Denver Butson has published four books of poetry: triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999), Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews Press, 2001), illegible address (Luquer Street Press, 2004) and the sum of uncountable things (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015). His work has been featured in Poetry 180, former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins’s program for the Library of Congress and its corresponding anthology, as well as in the Autumn House Press anthology New America, Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times and Agha Shahid Ali’s Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. Butson frequently collaborates with musicians, visual artists, filmmakers and actors and premiered some of that work in the show the sum of uncountable things, a month-long exhibition and performance series at Court Tree Collective during the launch of his latest book. Thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Butson is regularly featured on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac and has been published in the Yale Review, Exquisite Corpse, Brooklyn Rail and Quarterly West, among many other journals.