… at the Georgetown Public Library on three Saturdays:
April 2
April 9
April 16
Haven’t set the time yet, but it will probably be late morning/early afternoon. Here’s a description:
Lecture One: Winter kept us warm: Poetry as Paradox
In a year that began with a great blizzard in Washington, we’ll look first in this lecture series at what poetry makes of the snow: as an image, a symbol, a mood, a setting. We’ll focus on three poems – T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow,’ and Hayden Carruth’s ‘The Curtain’ – and ask not only what sort of utterance poetry is, but also what it offers us intellectually and emotionally as we experience the power of nature.
Lecture Two: Stirring dull roots with spring rain: Poetry as Life Itself
April is the month of these lectures; April is National Poetry Month; April marks the renewal of life in the spring season. That all sounds great, yet Eliot calls April “the cruellest month.” Our focus in this lecture will be James Schuyler’s exuberantly long poem, ‘Hymn to Life,’ which is set in Washington DC in the spring.
Lecture Three: Flying off into nothing: Poetry as Death
Our final two poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spring and Fall,’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Berck-Plage,’ complete our seasonal exploration of what poetry is, and what it can do by way of clarifying our relationship to our lives in nature.
January 29th, 2016 at 10:44AM
This is a nice thing for you to do, UD. This often gets a different group of people than the ones who come to universities for talks.
January 29th, 2016 at 2:48PM
THis year we are aggressively waiting for spring .. 🙂
January 29th, 2016 at 2:55PM
tp: Yes – though given its location the library draws a very literate crowd. But definitely not the typical university gathering.