University Diaries » UD is proud to announce that her poetry MOOC…

… has broken 7,000.

A reminder: An updated and expanded version of one of her MOOC lectures will form the basis of her remarks at the DC Public Library, Georgetown branch, on Charles Wright, who’s the current poet laureate. Date, time: Saturday, September 13, at 1:00. Open to the public.

And here’s a description of the upcoming talk:

America’s newest poet laureate, Charles Wright, has said this about his new job: “”I will not be an activist laureate… I’ll probably stay here at home and think about things.” Unlike most of his predecessors, Wright has no particular social or political agenda. His poetry is contemplative; he seems to write most of it while gazing, at night, toward the hills around Charlottesville, Virginia (he’s a professor at the University of Virginia). And what he writes – in long broad American lines, like Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg – expresses the strange metaphysical place in which a lot of contemporary people find themselves, drawn toward belief in God and the meaning and consolation such belief offers a life; yet profoundly skeptical, profoundly bound by earthly life.

I’ll offer, along with general thoughts about Charles Wright and his place in American poetry and culture, a close reading of one of his most famous poems, Black Zodiac, among whose lines I find this one most illuminating, suggestive, and beautiful:

We go to our graves with secondary affections,
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
star charts demagnetized.

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