House Lions is Wesleyan’s resident poetry podcast. To hear featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work, check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet every week.  For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.

Upcoming  Recordings and Events:

The next House Lions live recording will be Monday, February 22nd at 9 PM in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center. Come out to hear poets Susanna Myrseth ’10, Randyl Wilkerson ’12 and Leia Jane Zidel ’12 read and speak about their work.

Also, look for Sarah Ashkin’s work this weekend in Asa Horvitz’s thesis A Noise Like Wings, February 25th at 9 PM, February 26th at 10 PM and February 27th at 9 PM in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

This week’s poet: Sarah Ashkin ’11

Bio: Sarah Ashkin is a young body poet from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently a junior at Wesleyan University studying Dance Composition and Performance and Environmental Studies. Sarah is interested in making works that encourage dialogue between identity and the natural world. Recently, she has found a new confidence to fully believe in art as its own intuitive force.

From the Editor:

Sarah Ashkin’s poetic work is characterized, above all, by a serious respect for and celebration of the units of land, the human figure and the living element as  bodies in their own systems and within a greater labyrinth of forces. In Sarah’s work, the space of the human body navigates by juxtaposition and movement the New Mexico landscape as a framework for understanding what landscape is and does and what it builds, inside of and with and in spite of humans. In Sarah’s work the human body is both oppressive and gentle, made up of its own landscape elements of ribcage and spine as topographical details. Sarah’s writing is conscious of the ground that it walks on, where it leans for support and unabashedly brave in its work to build new space out of an ultimate coming together of ways of being human and ways of being alive.

Sarah Ashkin '11

Steel Leaves

Sanded, lipped, ambiguous reference to the pristine ruin.  Through a gap down to the handfuls. undertow of her departure made into texted body waves. I don’t really remember so Sara dries salt into steel leaves and next to me is such a pine- the needles are showing-there is no green, only grays and hints to everything we are also finding in absence.  Infrastructure and sea sprayed. there must be a whale even in this weather. Take lines and make telephone poles-take beach and make glasses. We are here by a river- make bridges.

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/rain.mp3″] In Response and Argument to William Carlos William’s “Rain”

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/steelleaves.mp3″] Steel Leaves

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/three.mp3″] Three

[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/fullinterview.mp3″] Full Interview