Berks Bards is excited to welcome Nathanael Tagg! Join us at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts to hear selected poetry. Following his reading, we'll allow ANYONE to step up to the mic and read what moves them.
When: March 7th, 2019 at 6 pm
Where: GoggleWorks Center for the Arts Studio 420
201 Washington Street Reading PA 19601
Read Nathanael Tagg's Bio below:
Nathanael Tagg has an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers, where he was a Truman Capote Literary Trust fellow. He is an associate professor at Cecil College. His first book, a collection of poems entitled Animal Virtue, was published by WordTech Editions in March 2018. His writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, Pleiades, and many other magazines. It employs humor, nature imagery, poetic form, and allusions—especially the biblical or literary—to explore the challenges of living well in times of personal, spiritual, or environmental trouble. He lives with his wife and their nine-month-old daughter in Lancaster, PA.
Read a sample poem from Nathanael below:
Our Baby Deepness
Really? Yes, science proves the virgin birth
of Komodo dragons, caused by the holy spirit
of loneliness. Often, a most mammal-like lizard
—call her Mary; look in her eyes (somebody
is home)—must have swum to paradise,
an island with everything she needs, bar
a mate. Evolution—call him Evo—
couldn’t brook this (no nativity) forever
and said, “No mate? No problem. Voila:
you’re pregnant.” Science contests every miracle?
Destroys a sense of beauty and mystery? Really?
No spirituality without dualism and theology?
To awe me, Jane, yours needn’t be a virgin birth
and won’t be, which your mom and I can confirm.
To the miraculous process, I’m peripheral.
Never mind another miracle: walking on water.
Oceanographer Sylvia Earle walked the ocean floor,
wore a pressurized suit, was reborn as Our Lady
Deepness, who says, “Kids don’t start out killing;
they start out wondering.” Jane, you’ll
be curious (in both senses) like Jane Goodall
and become yourself by living among us—
among animals. Like you, like fetuses, in wetness
Earle lives, learns, grows. Mirroring the odyssey
of your mom, every woman with child, all expectant
parents (me too!), Earle, while pregnant,
descended in a submersible to explore the depths.
Learn more about Nathanael by visiting his website: http://www.nathanaeltagg.com
