Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TV’s, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you irresistible. Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. In reminding us that language has history, density, complexity, such poetry becomes a potent antidote against an empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."

Registration required.

Host Organization: Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Register here: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__tZF8PfxT_CQCnSOK05ZQw

This lecture, which is part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, explores the doctrine of discovery that haunts American poetry. Lisa Jarnot engages in an autobiographical interrogation of what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, and what it means to have white privilege and write poetry. Several questions arise: What do we keep and what do we reject as we acknowledge the systemic racism and American exceptionalism that pervade even the most benign of bohemian writing communities? Is there something transcendent and healing in the poet’s love of making, knowing, and of forging human connections? How can social reckoning and personal romance co-exist in exploring (and having been influenced by) the writers of the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and the Beat Generation?

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with institutions nationwide. Find out more about past, present, and future lecturers, and explore the archive at www.bagleywrightlectures.org.

Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, NY and educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission (1996), Ring of Fire (2001), Black Dog Songs (2003), Night Scenes (2008), Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (2013) and A Princess Magic Presto Spell (2019). She co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets (1997), and her biography of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, was published by the University of California Press in 2012. She has been a visiting professor at Naropa University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, is a Masters of Divinity candidate at New York Theological Seminary and is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ.

Welcome! You are invited to join a Zoom meeting Amy Lowell scholars Melissa Bradshaw and Carl Rollyson. 

This year is the 150th anniversary of Amy Lowell’s birth, and the NEPC is conducting an event series to commemorate her substantial work as a poet and for the community. Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. In 1915, Lowell was one of the founders of the New England Poetry Club in 1915, along with Robert Frost and Conrad Aiken. She devoted her career to promoting the Imagist movement in modern poetics in America. Amy Lowell also pushed the boundaries of convention for her time in her feminist style and diva attitudes. More information on Lowell can be found here.

An award-winning Amy Lowell scholar, Dr. Melissa Bradshaw is editing both print and digital editions of the poet’s never-before collected letters. Professor Bradshaw suggests that she will provide some interesting—sometimes conflict-ridden—details of events in the early years of the New England Poetry Club when Lowell was its first president.

Professor Carl Rollyson is the author of the recently published biography, Amy Lowell Anew. His book presents details of Lowell’s unconventional life and critical reassessment of Lowell’s work and legacy.

Judith Ferrara traces the source of inspiration that sustained over three decades of creativity resulting in poetry, blogs, paintings, and an upcoming biography/memoir of Yetta Dine, mother of poet Stanley Kunitz (TidePool Press).

Judith Ferrara’s poems, essays and artwork have appeared in several books and numerous journals. In 2018, she received the Stanley Kunitz Medal from the Worcester County Poetry Association She was awarded a 2003 Worcester Cultural Commission/Massachusetts Cultural Council Creative Arts Fellowship. A Few Sweet Drops in My Bitter Cup, a biography/memoir of Yetta Dine, mother of poet Stanley Kunitz, from TidePool Press, is forthcoming this year.