“I think there’s some stigma to poetry readings, that they’re insanely uptight and incredibly boring,” says Joshua Beckman. He should know, since he writes, performs, and publishes the stuff. (He’s an editor at two-year-old Wave Books, owned by local arts benefactor Charlie Wright.) For Beckman, poetry, like religion, is not just a private experience to be locked up at home. Though trained as a fine-arts bookmaker, one who’s also tilled the soil as an organic farmer while writing and traveling his way around the globe, Beckman recognizes how poetry also has to change to suit the times. “My iPod has, like, Walt Whitman on it. That’s ridiculous!” Tonight he’s joined for a poetry-and-talk performance with Joel Felix (A Run Thru the Dictionary) in an evening called Arctic Plants and Ecopoetics. BRIAN MILLER

Sun., May 31, 8 p.m., 2009