About this Event
What happens when music and poetry join the same conversation?
Music and the Muse braids live music, poetry, and projected imagery into an immersive performance. Inspired by the deep connection between composing music and poetry, Raffi Joe Wartanian and the Sér Ensemble move between composed passages, improvisation, and live readings. As the ensemble builds shifting sonic landscapes, poets emerge to read their work against evocative projections, creating unexpected resonances between sound, language, and image.
Throughout the evening, music and poetry intermingle, each revealing new frontiers for the other. An elegy and fugue waltz in a Venice tango bar. Together, these interwoven forms forge a space where sound, language, and image merge toward a single unfolding experience.
Featured poets include Brian Sonia-Wallace, Los Angeles Poet Laureate, Kweku Abimbola, El Segundo Poet Laureate, and Tina Demirdjian, Glendale Poet Laureate.
Doors Open: 6:30 PM I Performances: 7:00 PM
About the Sér Ensemble: Raffi Joe Wartanian & the Sér Ensemble unite oud, violin, guitar, as a vehicle for original composition, intercultural conversation, and expressive transcendence. Helmed by composer, writer, and educator Raffi Joe Wartanian, the group—featuring guitarist Alexy Yeghikian & violinist Shant Tanielian—explores soundscapes where the Appalachian Mountains slope into the Mediterranean Sea. At its core is the oud—the ancient, fretless ancestor of the guitar—reimagined here as a living, compositional tool. Drawing from Armenian folk, modal jazz, flamenco, rebetiko, and poetry, the ensemble’s music flows through geographic and stylistic borders while reveling in the uprooted groundedness of the diasporic experience. “Sér,” meaning love in Armenian and to be in Spanish, reflects a guiding ethos: compositions as a container of both presence and relation, as in an unfolding practice of community, contemplation, and mutual care.
About the authors
Brian Sonia-Wallace is the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. They are a poet, educator, and public artist whose work explores the line between the intimate and the monumental, reimagining public space as a site of memory, care, and dialogue. Over the past decade and a half, he has written poems on-the-spot in public for over 10,000 strangers and their communities, a practice that has unfolded into books including The Poetry of Strangers (HarperCollins) and Maze Mouth (Moon Tide Press), as well as performances and public projects across theaters, galleries, and everyday city spaces. A City of LA Master Artist and former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, Sonia-Wallace has served as Poet-in-Residence for places as varied as the National Parks, Amtrak, and the Mall of America (yes, really). His work centers on creating art that bridges civic space, public memory, and lived experience, often collaborating with LGBTQ+ communities, youth, and elders to amplify voices that are rarely heard. A Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and LA County, his writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, LitHub, Rattle, and American Poets, and has been performed from Walt Disney Concert Hall to the Kennedy Center. He teaches at UCLA Extension, facilitates the APLA Health Writers’ Group, and leads school outreach for Get Lit – Words Ignite. More @rentpoet.
Born in the Gambia, Kweku Abimbola earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, Sierra Leonean, and Nigerian descent. Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, was published by Graywolf Press in April of 2023. The début collection received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2022. Abimbola is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the second-place winner of the Furious Flower 2020 poetry contest. He has work published and forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, 20.35 Africa, The Common, Obsidian, SUNU Journal, and elsewhere.
Tina Demirdjian is the recipient of numerous grants, including two from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Durfee ARC grant, and the California Council for the Humanities. She is the author of IMPRINT, her first poetry collection, and a contributor to Birthmark: A Bilingual Anthology of Armenian-American Poetry and recently anthologized in Remain In Light: Visions Of Homeland And Diaspora by UC Regents. Her work has appeared in Moria, High Performance, Texas Observer, The Midwest Poetry Review, and she has performed throughout Los Angeles. She is the owner of POETRY CONSULTS and is a facilitator, team-builder, and producer of events. Through her experience in schools, museums, libraries, and companies for 30 years she believes in the power of building and sustaining partnerships.
About Beyond Baroque
Beyond Baroque is one of the United States' leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public's knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.
Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.
If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.
Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.
Event venue & nearby stays
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.