Man-Moth & The Gospel of Possibility

Friday, May 1 at 7:30 PM
Saturday, May 2 at 7:30 PM
Sunday, May 3 at 2:00 PM

Performances take place at Teatro Paraguas' Second Space

$20 Ticket includes inaugural copy of Man-Moth & The Gospel of Possibility, a chapbook of poems by Donald Levering
$15 Limited Income Ticket
Click Here for Tickets

What: The event is centered around the book of poems, Man-Moth & The Gospel of Possibility, which will be released on the performance dates. The 20 poems will be read by two readers in a unique style of “double-down and overlap.” The live reading will be accompanied by audio and original music played on multiple instruments by a single musician. The readers will perform in a venue set will sculptural, fiber, and lighting elements designed to underscore thevthemes of the poetry.

Who: The four principles of the performance include Donald Levering, Gary Barten, Corinna MacNeice, and Barbara Mehlman. Levering is a well-known poet in Santa Fe with national awards who curates poetry readings. Barten has contributed to the local artistic scene with his nouveau-Symbolist painting and multi-faceted music concerts, and by hosting the Poets@HERE Gallery series. MacNeice is another long term Santa Fe area resident, accomplished both as a visual artist and an actor. Mehlman’s unique installation art, which merges several disparate elements, has garnered her and her Blue Studio recognition from Santa Fe and beyond. More detailed biographies follow.

The Back Story: The book came into existence after Levering read Elizabeth Bishop’s 1935 poem, “The Man-Moth.” Her poem was inspired by a misprint of the word “Man-Moth” for the word “mammoth” in the New York Times. Levering expanded on the idea of a Man-Moth hybrid being, writing poems that eventually coalesced into a book manuscript. After Barten heard Levering read some of his Man-Moth poems, Barten proposed a show in which he would create music to go with the poems. Mehlman was already on board to provide art for the book, so it was natural to invite her to create the central Man-Moth image and the setting for the performance at Teatro Paraguas. Levering had witnessed MacNeice’s stage performance and recognized how her powerful voice reading the poems would enhance the project. A further synchronicity occurred when Jules Nyquist and John Roche of Poetry Playhouse Publications accepted Levering’s book manuscript, Man-Moth & The Gospel of Possibility, and determined it could be published to coincide with the show’s opening.

Why: This particular confluence of art has never been done, because the artists are curious, because collaboration is in the air, because moths and mushrooms are rapidly becoming better understood and appreciated.

A Deeper Dive: In his collection of poems, Levering fleshes out the Man-Moth tale begun by Bishop in her single poem. Like Bishop’s character, Levering’s Man-Moth is an often unwelcome “other” who roams New York City, riding its subways “facing the wrong way” and scaling skyscrapers as he is pursued. He is ostracized by ordinary humans for his differences from them. This 21st century Man-Moth loves music and goes to jazz clubs. His human mother plays accordion and he longs to take up an instrument, but none quite fit his physiology. In result of his metamorphic nature, he is a perceived as a “vector of change,” where most humans crave familiarity. Even as Man-Moth experiences dance and romance as do ordinary humans, he acknowledges a number of traits inherited from his father moth. He is also drawn by powerful instinct to migrate with a host of moths flying to the Yucatan. Man-Moth receives Gospel of Possibility transmissions through his antennae which extol the virtues of fungi as nature’s messenger/resource exchanger and as a renewable building material resource as well as font of psychedelic insight.

The music which weaves through the show reinforces the alien aspects of the hounded and haunted Man-Moth while manifesting the beauty of a shared world that transcends species. Besides the riveting thematic image of Man-Moth in a receptive mode, the visual / physical setting emphasizes ongoing creation in the staged image of a cocoon and the ephemeral strands of transmission.

Donald Levering was born in Kansas City and grew up there and in New York. He holds an MFA from Bowling Green (Ohio) State University. A former NEA Fellow, he won The Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize and the Quest for Peace Prize for rhetoric. Levering’s poems have appeared in such reviews as Beloit Poetry Journal, Hiram Poetry, Hollins Critic, Hunger Mountain, Poet & Critic, Southern Poetry, Terrain.org , and Valparaiso. Man Moth & The Gospel of Possibility is his 17th poetry book. His previous book, Breaking Down Familiar, placed 1st in the New Mexico Press Women's Creative Verse Contest. He lives in Santa Fe, where he co-curates (with Barbara Rockman) the Poets@HERE series, conducts poetry craft workshops, and volunteers as a US citizenship tutor and with Kitchen Angels.

Born in London, Corinna MacNeice received a BA from Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. First andforemost she is a visual artist. Her charcoal and mixed media series, The Women of Mariupol, was recently featured in a show at Santa Fe’s HERE Gallery. As an actor, some of her favorite roles have been Ophelia in the Hamlet Machine (Caravan of Dreams Theatre, Fort Worth, TX); Heather in A Madhouse in Goa (Santa Fe Playhouse); Akmaktova in Three Poets (SFP); Laundress in the Butoh production Ashes (Wise Fool NM); Falconetti in Our Lady of Buenos Aires (Teatro Paraguas) and Lola in Tony Mare's Lola’s Last Dance (TP). She is very excited to be performing alongside Donald Levering in this experimental production.

Gary Barten is a visual artist and multi-instrumentalist and composer who performs on a variety of keyboard and string instruments solo, with other musicians, on CDs, and in live venues. He studied music theory and piano with the late May Harrow. He earned a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA in painting from Washington University. He has extensive experience as a scenic artist and designer for professional theaters. He has also taught art and design courses at several colleges. He and his partner, Katherine Meyer, owned and operated the HERE Gallery in Santa Fe from 2022 to 2025, which hosted the Poets@HERE series that featured such superb poets as Tommy Archuleta, Jon Davis, Demetria Martinez, Valerie Martinez, Michelle Otero, Margaret Randall, Miriam Sagan, Santana Shorty, James Thomas Stevens, Leslie Ullman, and Mark Wunderlich.

Barbara Mehlman received an MFA in painting and installation art from Claremont Graduate School. Her work fuses the material qualities of natural media and the slow collaging qualities of fabric art with the acrobatics of digital media. She invented “Artitorials,” a way to create generative digital art poems about live events as they unfold. She has been artist-in-residence at Jentel, Helene Wurlitzer, Vermont Studio Center, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Barbara has taught natural and digital media at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, and the Institute of American Indian Art. At her Santa Fe Blue Studio, you can find her inventing, teaching and holding community art events.

"This is a book of awe-full wonder that opens things up to multiple layers of meaning and exploration: There's the man piece, the moth piece, how those pieces merge and diverge, and the questions raised about 'reality;' The Gospel of Possibility underlies and builds on all of this."
— Stephen Bunch, Langston Hughes Award winner, author of Preparing to Leave and Transmissions from Bone House, editor of Tellus.

"For all of us who sometimes feel neither here nor there, not only one thing or another, but a container of conflicting human feelings, Man-Moth is a talisman. Levering’s poems are elegant and witty. Humor mixes with precise observation, the possible with the impossible. The poems themselves are chimerical—and the reader is the richer for it."
— Miriam Sagan, author ofUncollected Poems: What Solitude Sees In Me

"WOW! I'm blown away. Man-Moth goes to Birdland in cape, beret, and shades, he’s assaulted by naphthalene hailstones...This is so well thought out, Man-Moth is a complete being, his poems/adventures draw us in like Siren calls."
— Walter Lenci, San Francisco, Independent Scholar

"Hold on, reader. You’re in for a wild ride. Donald Levering takes us for a fungal performance spin on an ergot-induced, Polish-bog-monk fantasy schooner of superhero lepidopterology interpreted through the 'antenna nubs / abuzz with hertz and blips / and humming portents of the 'Man-Moth' -- expounding his gospel of possibility. The poems are witty, outlandish, relevant beyond their surface gloss – chewing through the Hereafter, removing the doors of perception from their hinges, 'plying the margins twixt wave and particle,' infecting a world 'incinerated / by slight' with imagination’s eternal broth of awe and self-repairing fungus."
— Art Goodtimes, Performance poet, program director for Colorado’s Talking Gourds Poetry Program, and poet-in- residence for the Telluride Mushroom Festival