Poetry 1415

Join us in 2014/15 for a series of readings— each a new and dynamic opportunity for you to be introduced to an emerging poet or reintroduced to one of your favorites.

202.544.7077 www.folger.edu/poetry

201 East Capitol Street, SE Washington, DC 20003

“The stars, bashful behind the veil of day, / what possesses them to become scandalous by night?” —Vijay Seshadri

poetry series 2014/15

NON-PROFIT ORG. U.S.POSTAGE PAID HAGERSTOWN, MD PERMIT NO. 93

OB HARDISON That’s how a faint star becomes visible— just a glimpse at first, then the long adventure of saying what exactly it is that shines behind so much of its own smoke and gas.

—Stephen Dunn

Poetry as illumination —Audre Lorde

This is poetry as illumination, for it is through are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to

Celebrating 46 seasons of poetry at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series provides a stage for contemporary poetry’s most eloquent voices—from the lyrical to the experimental, the emergent to the long-cherished.

In addition to the reading series, O.B. Hardison Poetry engages students through a Poetry in Schools program and Shakespeare’s Sisters seminar on early modern women writers. The Lannan Fellows program connects selected students from area colleges and universities to attend the series readings. We collaborate with D.C. Poet Laureate Dolores Kendrick for her annual Poets in Progress reading, in addition to creating original events like the MLK Day at the Folger. This season we are proud to partner with these outstanding literary and cultural organizations: The Emily Dickinson International Society, Georgetown University, Graywolf Press, The Hurston/Wright Foundation, Library of Congress, University of Pennsylvania, The Phillips Collection, Poet Lore, The Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, and The Waywiser Press.

Join us also for Poets Respond, free poetry readings that respond to Folger Theatre productions. These begin on Friday, November 21 at 6pm when poets Joshua Weiner and Hayes Davis read poetry including original work in response to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Visit www.folger.edu/poetry for information.

The Folger Poetry Board provides significant support, sponsors fundraising salon evenings, and underwrites a named reading at the end of each season.

Ms. Gigi Bradford, Chair Mr. Edwin P. Conquest, Jr. Ms. Christina Daub Ms. Harriet Patsy Davis Mrs. Marifrancis Hardison Mr. Joseph Hassett Ms. Anita Herrick Mr. Sherman E. Katz Mr. Robert C. Liotta Mr. Richard Lyon Mr. Greg McBride Ms. Mary P. McElveen Mrs. Barbara Meade Mrs. Mary Muromcew

Ms. Jean Nordhaus Mrs. Jacqueline L. Quillen Mrs. Susan S. Rappaport Ms. Heddy Reid Dr. Marianne Schuelein Mrs. Joan Shorey Mr. Norman Sinel Mrs. Amy Tercek Mr. Nigel Twose Mr. David Weisman Ms. Mary-Sherman Willis Ms. Anne Harding Woodworth Teri Cross Davis, Poetry Coordinator

Cover poetry excerpt from “Turning Yourself Into A Work of Art” by Stephen Dunn, from Here and Now © 2011 W.W. Norton; Audre Lorde quotes from “Poetry is not a luxury,” first published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture no. 3 (1977). Poetry excerpt on mailer from 3 Sections © 2013 by Vijay Seshadri, published by Graywolf Press.

Used with permission.

poetry that we give name to those ideas which be birthed, but already felt. —Audre Lorde

OB HARDISON poetry series 2014/15 Honoring O.B. Hardison (1928-1990)

Poet, teacher, author, and scholar, O. B. Hardison held wide-ranging interests and a passion for teaching.

While at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (he also taught at Princeton and Georgetown), he was named one of the country’s great teachers by Time magazine.

This same spirit led Hardison, while Director of the Folger from 1969 to 1984, to create public and outreach programs including the Folger Poetry Series, renamed in 2010 in his honor. Hardison was the editor or author of 16 books, including celebrated academic volumes, poetry, and a murder mystery.

His awards included the Medieval Academy of America’s Gold Medal Award and the 1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest.

A recording of O.B. Hardison reading from his poetry is available on CD at www.folger.edu/shop.

“Stephen Dunn’s newest poems— retrospective, elegiac, comic, quotidian, tactful, and transcendent....

Lines of Defense reconfirms Dunn’s long-held place as one of our most necessary American poets.”

—Jane Hirshfield

Here and Now

Poet Lore Celebrates 125 Years of Literary Discovery

Traci Brimhall Cornelius Eady Terrance Hayes Linda Pastan

Stephen Dunn

September 15 Monday at 7:30pm Co-sponsored with Poet Lore, a publication of The Writer’s Center, and with support from the National Endowment for the Arts

September 29 Monday at 7:30pm

Introductions by Poet Lore editors Jody Bolz and E. Ethelbert Miller

Introduction and conversation moderated by poet Alan King

Stephen Dunn’s work is quiet and precise.

His poems artfully remove the veil from the ordinary, casually displaying the striking world hidden beneath our gaze. He has written 17 collections of poetry, and his latest is Lines of Defense. Dunn received the Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 collection Different Hours and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This special 125th anniversary of Poet Lore, the nation’s oldest poetry magazine, is celebrated with four of the many acclaimed poets whose work has been featured in its pages. Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins, selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery, winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Co-founder of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry; his most recent work is Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems. Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead was the winner of the 2010 National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize and former Poet Laureate of Maryland, Linda Pastan is the author of numerous volumes of poetry. Her latest book is Traveling Light.

From Stephen Dunn’s

Here and Now

Let night come with its austere grandeur, ancient superstitions and fears.

It can do us no harm. we’ll put some music on, open the curtains, let things darken as they will.

From Linda Pastan’s

Bronze Bells of Autumn I love the dark (it moves so gradually) but love still more all it will erase: these swarming leaves, this pungent smoky air, the youth you were, your aging face.

From Traveling Light © 2011 by Linda Pastan, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used with permission.

202.544.7077

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From Here and Now © 2011 by Stephen Dunn, published by W.W. Norton. Used with permission.

October 20 Monday at 7:30pm Co-sponsored with Graywolf Press

“Seshadri is a son of Frost by way of Ashbery: both the high-frequency channels of consciousness and the jazz of spoken language are audible in these poems.”

—The New Yorker

Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Writing from the Edge: 40th Anniversary of Graywolf

Matthea Harvey Claudia Rankine Vijay Seshadri with Stephen Burt

The Hecht Prize, created in honor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht, is awarded annually

by The Waywiser Press for a poetry collection by a poet who has published no more than one previous book of verse. It includes publication with a $3,000 prize.

Geoffrey Brock Heather McHugh November 17 Monday at 7:30pm Co-sponsored with The Waywiser Press Introduced by Philip Hoy, editor-in-chief of The Waywiser Press

Graywolf Press is an acclaimed independent publisher that champions writers at all stages of their careers. Three poets with books published by Graywolf read in honor of its 40th anniversary. Matthea Harvey is the author of five books of poetry, including If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? and Modern Life, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and a New York Times Notable Book. Claudia Rankine’s volumes of poetry include her most recent Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Vijay Seshadri is the author of 3 Sections, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and The Long Meadow, winner of the James Laughlin Award.

Moderator Stephen Burt is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Belmont, and several critical books, including Close Calls with Nonsense.

From Vijay Seshadri’s

New Media Why I wanted to escape experience is nobody’s business but my own, but I always believed I could if I could put experience into words.

Now I know better.

Now I know words are experience.

From 3 Sections © 2013 by Vijay Seshadri, published by Graywolf Press.

Used with the permission of the publishers, www.graywolfpress.org.

202.544.7077

Geoffrey Brock is awarded the ninth Hecht Prize for his collection Voices Bright Flags.

Brock’s first collection, Weighing Light, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize in 2005. He is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Arkansas.

From Geoffrey Brock’s

Confluence upon these layered grounds, upon this speechless tongue, here upon land that was everyone else’s before and after it was ours, the woman I loved and I came down to the waters edge at dusk, as thirsting animals will, a woman later looked for in other women, and in myself, and we were the latest triumphant army, we ruled the conquered dead awhile, voices bright flags rippling from our throats, bodies twin rivers spilling together toward the Gulf, rivers from whose brackish currents we may never stop drinking.

www.folger.edu/poetry

Heather McHugh’s poetry dismantles language to build within it a temple of praise. She has published eight books of poetry, one collection of critical essays, and four books of translation. Her Eyeshot was shortlisted for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize; Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968 -1993 was a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. She won the 1998 O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize, served from 1999 to 2006 as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a MacArthur Grant in 2009. She is currently Milliman Writer-inResidence at the University of Washington in Seattle.

From Voices Bright Flags © 2014 by Geoffrey Brock published by The Waywiser Press. Used with the permission.

The Dickinson evening is part of a day-long reading of her work, held at the Library of Congress.

Visit www.loc.gov/poetry for information.

Rafael Campo

“Armitage’s poems, funny and savage, reveal unlovely aspects of modern life, but they also glitter with comedy.”

—The New Republic

Drama & Verse

Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute

“Campo’s rhymes and iambs construct their music against the edgy, recognizable world his poems inhabit: the landscape of birth and of dying, sorrow and sex, shame and brave human persistence—first and last things, center stage in these largehearted, open, deeply felt poems.”

—Mark Doty

“Oswald has the priceless gift of dramatic speech.”

—The Times Oswald’s translation of Schiller’s Mary Stuart is on stage at Folger Theatre, January 27-March 8.

Simon Armitage Peter Oswald

December 8 Monday at 7:30pm

February 3 Tuesday at 7:30pm

Co-sponsored with the Poetry Society of America In association with the Emily Dickinson Museum

Conversation moderated by Paul Smith, Director of British Council USA

Simon Armitage is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Seeing Stars; Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid; and The Shout: Selected Poems, which was short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has also published fiction and written extensively for television, film, and theater, including the libretto for the opera The Assassin Tree and the 1992 film Xanadu. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Night was selected as a Book of the Year by both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Rafael Campo bridges the worlds of arts and science and here brings his unique voice to this annual poetry reading in honor of Emily Dickinson. Campo has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Alternative Medicine. His collection The Other Man Was Me won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (a collection of essays now under the title The Desire to Heal) won a Lambda Literary Award for memoir. He teaches general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and practices at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, while also teaching creative writing on the faculty of the Lesley University MFA program.

From Simon Armitage’s

You’re Beautiful because you’re classically trained.

I’m ugly because I associate piano wire with strangulation.

At the reception following the reading, Emily Dickinson’s black cake is provided by The Suga Chef.

You’re beautiful because you stop to read the cards in newsagents’ windows about lost cats and missing dogs.

I’m ugly because of what I did to that jellyfish with a lolly stick and a big stone.

From Rafael Campo’s

V. Elegy for the AIDS Virus How difficult it is to claim one’s right to living honestly.The honesty you taught was nothing quite as true as death, but neither was it final.

From Diva © 1999 by Rafael Campo, published by Duke University Press. Used with permission.

Peter Oswald is a poet, playwright, and actor. His most recent poetry collection is The Reply to the Light, and his poems have been performed in venues including The Rose Theatre, South West Storytelling Festival, and the Globe Theatre. Oswald has been Playwright-in-Residence at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Dartington, Devon, and at the Finborough Theatre, London.

His Mary Stuart, produced by the Donmar Warehouse, transferred to Broadway in 2009 for an award-winning run.

You’re beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not a marketing campaign.

I’m ugly because desperation is impossible to hide.

202.544.7077

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From Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid © 2013 by Simon Armitage, published by Random House. Used with permission.

Man Ray—Human Equations is on view at The Phillips Collection February 7–May 10

Rae Armantrout February 19 Thursday at 6:30pm Co-sponsored with and held at The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street, NW, Washington, DC Conversation moderated by Guy Raz, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour

Man Ray, Twelfth Night, 1948, oil on canvas, © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society, NY/ADAGP, Paris 2014

Rae Armantrout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a dozen books of poetry, including Itself, Money Shot,Versed, Next Life, and Veil: New and Selected Poems.

In 2009 she received the National Books Critics Circle Award.

Armantrout has also published a short memoir, True, and her Collected Prose was published in 2007. She is a professor and director of the New Writing Series at University of California, San Diego.

In the late 1940s, Man Ray created Shakespearean Equations, a series of paintings inspired by photographs of mathematical models he made in Paris in the 1930s. This exhibition displays side-by-side the original models, his photographs of the objects, and the surrealist-inflected Shakespearean Equations, connecting his approach to the geometric forms with his other works.

Mother Tongue: Poetry in Translation

Human Equations at The Phillips Collection

“Always smart, given to sardonic humor, and surprisingly down-to-earth.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Not so long ago we had two incredible voices—Neruda and Miłosz. Now we have Adam Zagajewski, who also speaks passionately from both the historical and personal perspective, in poems reduced to a clean lyrical clarity. In one poet’s opinion (mine), he is now our greatest and truest representative, the most pertinent, impressive, meaningful poet of our time.”

—Mary Oliver

Adam Zagajewski Clare Cavanagh with Edward Hirsch March 16 Monday at 7:30pm Co-sponsored with the Poetry Society of America In this bilingual reading, Polish poet Adam Zagajewski will read alongside his translator, Clare Cavanagh, followed by a conversation moderated by Edward Hirsch. Adam Zagajewski is a poet, novelist, and essayist. His books of poetry include Tremor, Canvas, Mysticism for Beginners,Without End,Two Cities, Another Beauty, and A Defense of Ardor. Zagajewski divides his time between Chicago, Paris, and Kraków. Clare Cavanagh has translated numerous volumes of Polish poetry and prose, particularly the work of Wisława Szymborska. She is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. Moderator Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet, advocate for poetry, and served as the 2008 Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His latest book is The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems.

Ticketholders may view the exhibition prior to the reading.

From Rae Armantrout’s

Parting Shots

From Adam Zagajewski’s

Long, confident sentences of the early visitors,

Wait For An Autumn Day Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly weary sun, for dusty air, a pale day’s weather.

so unlike ours, so much like one another, remark on the sculpted “grandeur”

Wait for the maple’s rough, brown leaves, etched like an old man’s hands, for chestnuts and acorns,

of the walls, and then, with one light touch,

for an evening when you sit in the garden with a notebook and the bonfire’s smoke contains the heady taste of ungettable wisdom

on the bracing sense of insignificance that they impart.

From Just Saying © 2013 by Rae Armantrout, published by Wesleyan University Press. Used with permission.

202.544.7077

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From Eternal Enemies © 2008 by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Used with permission.

Folger Poetry Board Reading

“Whether written in free verse or according to a formal pattern, Dove’s poetry is highly musical, often reveling in sensual yet sense-appropriate rhymes.”

—San Franciso Chronicle

In this annual reading, a distinguished poet shares favorite poems by other poets in addition to reading from her own work.

Rita Dove May 19 Tuesday at 7:30pm Introduction and conversation moderated by Guy Raz, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour

2014/15 Lannan Readings at Georgetown University Presented with the generous support of the Lannan Foundation

Georgetown Lannan Poetry events are free and open to the public.

All readings are on Tuesdays at 8pm in Copley Formal Lounge, on campus, 37th and O Streets, NW Washington, DC. For details and information, call 202.687.6294 or visit lannan.georgetown.edu

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

September 30 Phillips’s The Ground: Poems won the 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.

A poet, novelist, and critic, he has been published in The Paris Review, Granta, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Jo Shapcott

October 14 Shapcott has published three poetry collections and has won a number of literary prizes, including the Forward Prize and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Her most recent Of Mutability won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Eileen Myles The work of Rita Dove exhibits a formal grace with elegant phrasing that glides and dips, displaying an excitement and mastery of the language. Dove is a former U.S. Poet Laureate (1993-1995) and recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Thomas and Beulah.

Her most recent poetry collections are Sonata Mulattica and American Smooth, and she is sole editor of The Penguin Anthology of TwentiethCentury American Poetry. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Rita Dove’s

To The Continent 1803

When I was a child, I was content to fit the notes to the joy I felt.

Chords unfurled shimmering ribbons I twirled myself in, as if into a chrysalis.

Then I wanted love, whole sheets of it to wrap myself warm for sleeping.

Less spontaneous, I performed vigorously; the world was not as large as the sound I sent to it. More admiration, fetes.

Women began sampling, nibbles & slurps; I played to keep the noise going, to fill me up. But now I want only to find love that resists, notes that will not fit; I want to be appalled & staggered in equal measures, I want blood & blood’s aftermath—

October 28 Myles has produced more than 20 volumes of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.The Poetry Society of America awarded her the Shelley Prize in 2010.

Natalie Diaz & Rigoberto González

November 11 Diaz, a member of the Mojave and Pima Indian tribes, has been published in Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, among others.

Her work was selected by Natasha Trethewey for Best New Poets, and she has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.

González has written four books of poetry and nine books of prose, including two bilingual children’s books.

His writing has garnered him the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts.

weariness & affliction, sans mercy.

“To The Continent” from Sonata Mulattica,W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY © 2009 by Rita Dove. Reprinted by permission.

Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice

OB HARDISON

Okwiri Oduor

February 10 Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Okwiri Oduor, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing for her story “My Father’s Head,” reads from her work. She teaches creative writing to young girls at her alma mater in Nairobi and is currently working on her first full-length novel.

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Ammiel Alcalay & Fanny Howe

February 24 Alcalay has published extensively as a poet, novelist, translator, critic, and scholar. His books include a little history, Scrapmetal, and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture.

The author of more than 20 books of poetry and prose, Howe has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Village Voice, in addition to fellowships from the Bunting Institute and MacDowell Colony. In 2009 she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Peter Gizzi & Michael Palmer

March 17 Gizzi is the author of several books of poetry, with works that have been translated and anthologized. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2011 he was the Judith E.Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University.

Palmer penned his first collection of poetry, Blake’s Newton, in 1974, and has since frequently collaborated with visual artists and composers. He has received recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, among others.

Tickets Folger poetry readings include moderated conversations and are followed by complimentary wine receptions and book signings, with books for sale at the Folger shop.

Tickets are $15 with discounts for students and others available.

Online: www.folger.edu/poetry

By Phone: 202.544.7077

In Person:

Visit the Box Office, Open Monday-Saturday, Noon-5pm

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April 21 Mengestu is the author of three novels, most recently All Our Names. He is the recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and a MacArthur genius grant.

202.687.6294

Folger Shakespeare Library

Programs and dates subject to change.

Dinaw Mengestu

Georgetown University

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