National Poetry Month Celebrates the Collaborative Act

April is National Poetry Month, and the InKY Reading Series, a monthly literary event, will celebrate with a reading at The Bard’s Town tomorrow. Poets Adam Day and Brian Barker are the featured guests. Day, a Louisville native, is the writer-in-residence at Earlham College. His short collection “Badger, Apocrypha” won the 2010 Poetry Society of America chapbook fellowship. He’s also co-editor of Catch-Up, a literary journal devoted to poetry and comics.Day calls poetry a collaborative act between the writer and his reader, and he says live readings make that relationship more exciting — and more real.“The same way in which seeing a band somehow makes the music more real or more alive, or for that matter the musicians more kind of real, because you’re encountering the physicality of that thing,” he says.Day plans to read from new work at Friday’s event, including a series of poems inspired by European art-house filmmakers of the Sixties and Seventies. He credits the way filmmakers use atmosphere to inform character and place as a strong influence on his work.“These kinds of atmospheres can allow other things to go unsaid and to amplify without being explicit. That’s really something I work for in my poems,” says Day.Day will be joined by poet Brian Barker, a former Murray State University creative writing professor.Barker is the author of “The Animal Gospels” and “The Black Ocean,” which won the 2010 Crab Orchard Press open competition. Barker teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado-Denver, where he co-edits the literary journal Copper Nickel.The event is free and begins at 7 p.m. with an open mic. Louisville pop-punk band Reading Group will play a set before the featured poets perform.