Poetry Foundation and Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral Present A Performance of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions with Poetry

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, in partnership with Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral present a free performance of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions paired with poetry on Tuesday, August 15, at 5:15 p.m. at the St. James Episcopal Cathedral.

What: Bach’s Two-Part Inventions paired with poetry, featuring pianist Deborah Sobol with prize-winning poets Dan Beachy-Quick, Reginald Gibbons, Christina Pugh, Emily Warn, and Anne Winters
When: Tuesday, August 15, at 5:15 p.m.
Where: St. James Episcopal Cathedral, 65 East Huron Street (Huron & Wabash)
Admission to the event is free.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the Two-Part Inventions as exercises for his students, each Invention in a different key and each one meant to convey a single musical idea or lesson. This unique multi-media concert makes the Inventions exercises for five prominent writers who have written brief poems that relate in mood or concept or melody to one of the Inventions. The poets will read their poems as prefaces to the Bach pieces.

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Dan Beachy-Quick received his MFA at the University of Iowa, and currently teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of two books, North True South Bright, named one of Fence magazine’s Best Books by Emerging Writers in the fall, 2003; and Spell, a book-length reverie on Moby Dick. His poems and essays have appeared in such periodicals as Poetry, Ploughshares, and Parnassus. He made his literary debut at 20 in The Paris Review.

Reginald Gibbons served as the editor of TriQuarterly magazine from 1981 to 1997; during that time he published special issues of writing from South Africa, Spain, Poland and Mexico. He also co-founded and edited TriQuarterly Books. His latest publications are two chapbooks, In the Warhouse and Fern-Texts. He has published seven poetry collections, most recently Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, Homage to Longshot O’Leary, and It’s Time; a collection of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches; a novel Sweetbitter; and other works. He has held Guggenheim and NEA fellowships in poetry, and has won the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Prize, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s 2004 O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors. A columnist for American Poetry Review, he teaches at Northwestern and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Christina Pugh won the Word Press First Book Prize for Rotary (2004). Her poems have recently appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Pugh’s criticism has appeared in Poetry, Verse, Boston Review, and Herspace: Women, Writing, Solitude. She is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Journals Award in Poetry, a Whiting Fellowship for the Humanities, and a residency fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. A professor at UIC, she is currently completing a volume of poems entitled Restoration.

Deborah Sobol is the founder and artistic director of Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral. She is also a founding member of The Chicago Chamber Musicians. She attended Smith College, where she worked with Lory Wallfisch, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Her post-graduate studies took place in Vienna at the Hochschule für Musik with Hans Petermandl, and at London’s Royal College of Music with Carola Grindea. Ms. Sobol has performed in solo and duo recitals, concerto performances, and chamber music concerts throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. A much sought-after teacher of piano, she has been on the faculty of the Longy School of Music and the Northwestern University School of Music. Her publications have appeared in Clavier and London’s Piano Journal.

Emily Warn is the author of The Leaf Path, The Novice Insomniac, and the forthcoming 22 Kits of Creation, all from Copper Canyon Press, and two chapbooks The Book of Esther and Highway Suite. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely, including in The Kenyon Review, Poetry East, Mississippi Mud, The Bloomsbury Review, The Seattle Times, Parabola, and the Seattle Weekly. She is currently the Editor of PoetryFoundation.org.

Anne Winters is on the faculty at UIC. Her books include The Displaced of Capital, The Key to City, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, and Salamander: Selected Poetry of Robert Marteau, winner of Poetry magazine’s Jacob Glatstein Translation Award. She has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, Wellesley College’s Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant, among others, and has been a Fellow of the Carmargo and Karolyi Foundations in southern France.

For further details, and to sign up to receive email notices of Poetry Foundation events, please visit www.PoetryFoundation.org

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Rush Hour Concerts at St. James Cathedral offer classic chamber music selections performed by artists from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and The Chicago Chamber Musicians, and other eminent artists. An antidote to weekday stress, Rush Hour Concerts make the transition from busy summer day to busy summer night more musical, pleasant, peaceful and sociable. Free and open to the public, the concerts take place at 5:45 p.m. each Tuesday, June through August, in the cathedral’s sanctuary, Huron Street and Wabash Avenue. Light refreshments served at 5:15 p.m. precede the performance. More information is available at 312-787-7360 or www.saintjamescathedral.org.


The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. One of the largest literary organizations in the world, the Foundation exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit PoetryFoundation.org.