← Previous Post: | Next Post: →

 

Come to UD’s Poetry Lectures…

… 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.

Margaret Soltan, January 29, 2016 7:39AM
Posted in: poem

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=51016

3 Responses to “Come to UD’s Poetry Lectures…”

  1. theprofessor Says:
    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.

  2. John Karley Says:
    January 29th, 2016 at 2:48PM

    THis year we are aggressively waiting for spring .. 🙂

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:
    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.

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories