Jerry Martien and the Usual Suspects

Poet Jerry Martien returns to Arcata Playhouse on Saturday, May 11 with musicians

Fred Neighbor, Gary Davidson, and Mike LaBolle. Martien will read poems from new

and old collections, drawing on half a century of life and performance in Humboldt

County venues.

“It’s become a kind of ritual,” he says from his home in Elk River. “Poetry reports on the

state of the bioregion.” Martien has read up and down the Pacific coast, from San

Francisco to Sitka, but he and his work have always found their home in local readings

and in poetry workshops from Petrolia to Forks of Salmon.

His poems take the natural world, forests and rivers and their inhabitants, as his

principal subject, but this reading will also take in the homeless, the rate payers and

citizens of our towns and service districts, as well as the personal issues of family,

aging, and coping with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Martien has performed for several years with Neighbor, Davidson, and LaBolle, claiming

that their music provides “the honey that helps the medicine go down.” Copies of his

books and CD’s will be available.