Poetry Foundation Announces Fall 2012 Programming

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to present its programming schedule for fall 2012. This October, Harriet Monroe’s “small monthly magazine,” Poetry, will mark its hundredth birthday. To celebrate, the Poetry Foundation offers a slate of programs that, as the founding editor wrote, “shall give poets a chance to be heard.” We hope you will join us this fall to commemorate the first hundred years of Poetry and to celebrate what Monroe described as “the most necessary and universal of the arts.”

Highlights of the fall series include readings by Joy Harjo, Seamus Heaney, Li-Young Lee, and Sonia Sanchez; a centennial celebration and book release party for The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine; a theatrical performance that brings founding editor Harriet Monroe and her fellow modernists to life on the stage; and poetry partnered with music and dance. The season’s diverse schedule includes a range of events, most of which are free. The full schedule is available at poetryfoundation.org/programs/events.

Poetry Foundation Fall 2012 Events

Poetry Presents
Seeing the Light: Intersections of Cinema and Poetry
Friday, September 7, 7 pm
Southside Hub of Production
5638 South Woodlawn Avenue, Hyde Park
Free admission

There is a well-established history of poetry and cinema commingling, yet poetry shares the most with the tradition of experimental/avant-garde cinema, those films that are unburdened by the constraints of narrative logic, stylistic continuity, and mainstream approval. Borrowing the title from James Broughton’s tract on cinema, South Side Projections and Poetry magazine present a program of three short films by renowned experimental directors, each with poetic roots. Broughton’s Four in the Afternoon (1951, 16mm, 15 min.) adapts poems from his book Musical Chairs into a series of vignettes about four eccentric characters in search of love. Narrated by Orson Welles, Larry Jordan’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1977, 16mm, 40 min.) warps Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic ballad into a chromatic fever dream. Stan Brakhage’s Deus Ex (1971, 16mm, 33 min.) was inspired by a Charles Olson poem and Brakhage’s own frequent hospital visits. The film uses footage of an open-heart surgery to raise questions about our obsession with extending life beyond its natural boundaries.

Co-sponsored with South Side Projections

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Poetry off the Shelf
Sonia Sanchez
Thursday, September 13, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

 Sonia Sanchez is the internationally acclaimed author of more than 20 books, including Homecoming, Homegirls and Handgrenades, which won the American Book Award in 1985, Shake Loose My Skin, and, most recently, Morning Haiku. One of the founding members of the Black Arts Movement and an influential advocate for civil rights, Sanchez has received many accolades for her literature and activism, among them the Langston Hughes Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Peace and Freedom Award. She was recently named Philadelphia’s first poet laureate.

Co-sponsored with the Neighborhood Writing Alliance

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Harriet Reading Series
Joanne Kyger
Friday, September 14, 6:30 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

 A central influence among the Beats, and later the New York School and Language poets, Joanne Kyger has authored more than 20 books of poetry and prose, including As Ever: Selected Poems, Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964, and,most recently, About Now: Collected Poems, for which she was awarded the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award for Poetry. A reception will follow.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Lucille Clifton Tribute & Book Launch
Thursday, September 20, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

“One always feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton’s poems,” observed the judges in awarding her the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Clifton once told an interviewer that “writing is a way of continuing to hope…a way of remembering I am not alone.” Poets Michael S. Glaser, Li-Young Lee, Elise Paschen, Kevin Young, and other special guests offer tributes and read favorite works to celebrate The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. A reception will follow.

Co-sponsored with BOA Editions

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Poetry and Music
And the Poet Sang
Saturday, September 22, 7 pm
Sunday, September 23, 3 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

This program features poems by William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, William Butler Yeats, Anne Sexton, and Violetta Parra set to music by The Crooked Mouth and others. Purveyors of original music with roots in vaudeville, and harmonizing on themes of loss and forbearance, The Crooked Mouth is 
Beau O’Reilly (vocals), Jenny Magnus (drums and vocals), Troy Martin (guitar, ukulele, and vocals), Matt Test (banjo, accordion, piano, and vocals), and Vicki Walden (bass and vocals).

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Poetry off the Shelf
Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics
Thursday, September 27, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

Part of a national series, this program explores the role of politics in the literary landscape today. Suji Kwock Kim is a Korean American whose first collection, Notes from the Divided Country, won the Walt Whitman Award. Li-Young Lee is the son of Chinese political exiles and has published four volumes of poetry and a memoir, The Winged Seed. The former poet laureate of Brooklyn and a frequent commentator on human rights, D. Nurkse is the author of 10 poetry collections, most recently A Night in Brooklyn. Alice Quinn, executive director of the Poetry Society of America, will moderate.

Co-sponsored with the Poetry Society of America

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Poetry Presents
Poetry’s Centennial Celebration and The Open Door Release Party
Thursday, October 4, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission. Please call (312) 787-7070 or email [email protected] if you plan to attend.

To celebrate Poetry’s 100th birthday, editors Christian Wiman and Don Share have assembled a unique anthology, The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine. Contributors to the magazine’s “View from Here” section, including Pulitzer Prize–winning Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, Museum of Contemporary Art curator Naomi Beckwith, and St. Paul’s United Church of Christ senior minister Matt Fitzgerald, among other special guests, will read favorite poems from the anthology. Patricia Barber and Larry Kohut will perform. A celebration follows.

 Co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Press

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Poetry on Stage
Harriet Monroe & the Modernists
Sunday, October 7, 3 pm
Monday, October 8, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission, tickets required
Tickets at monroeandmodernists.eventbrite.com or by calling (312) 787-7070. Limit 2 tickets per reservation.

“I trust that you may be interested in this project for the relief of the muse. It will be a great pleasure and honor if you are willing to testify to that interest by sending us a poem or a group of poems for early publication. Indeed, I can think of no contribution which would delight me more.” So wrote Harriet Monroe to W.B. Yeats in August 1912 in hopes that she might persuade the famous writer to send work to her fledgling journal, Poetry. Yeats sent work, as did such unknown writers as Ezra Pound, Edna St. Vincent Millay, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, H.D., Wallace Stevens, Carl Sandburg, and countless others. Using a script prepared by Second City Theater co-founder Bernard Sahlins, well-known Chicago actors celebrate Poetry’s 100th birthday by going behind the scenes at the magazine to read the sometimes scandalous, always lively correspondence between Harriet Monroe, her successors, and contributing poets who have since entered the canon of poetry in English. Romance, rivalries, supersized egos, financial difficulties, and sublime kindness will be on display, along with some of the greatest hits from the magazine’s pages.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Translating Poetry: Reading & Conversations
Friday, October 12, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

The Poetry Foundation continues a conversation that originated at the American Academy in Rome last May. Four award-winning poet-translators—Patrizia Cavalli, Geoffrey Brock, Clare Cavanagh, and Adam Zagajewski—will gather for readings and discussion of current approaches to translating Polish and Italian poetry.

Co-sponsored with the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute as part of the International Poets in Conversation consortium tour

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Open House Chicago
Saturday, October 13, 9 am–5 pm
Sunday, October 14, 9 am–5 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

The Poetry Foundation will once again take part in the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House Chicago, a free public event that offers behind-the-scenes access to more than 150 buildings across the city and suburbs. Visitors to the building will have an opportunity to explore the space over the weekend as well as get a rare glimpse into the making of Poetry magazine, celebrating its centennial in 2012.

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Poetry Day
Seamus Heaney
Thursday, October 18, 6 pm
Rubloff Auditorium
Art Institute of Chicago
Enter only at Modern Wing, 159 East Monroe
Free admission, tickets required
Tickets available beginning October 1 only at seamusheaney.eventbrite.com or by calling (312) 787-7070. Limit 2 tickets per reservation.

Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney will give the 2012 Poetry Day reading. Born in 1939 at his family’s farm in Northern Ireland, Heaney published his first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966, and the book won the Geoffrey Faber Prize and the Gregory Award. Heaney has gone on to issue more than a dozen collections of verse, most recently District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The Nobel judges cited Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He is also the author of essays and versions of Sophocles, Pushkin, and others. His 1999 translation of Beowulf was a bestseller. Heaney has taught at Queen’s University, Harvard, and Oxford. He first appeared in Poetry magazine in February 1972.

Inaugurated by Robert Frost in 1955, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished reading series in the country. Past readers have included T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hass, and Derek Walcott.

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago

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Poetry off the Shelf
Music/Words: Inna Faliks, Valzhyna Mort, and Vera Pavlova
Monday, October 22, 7 pm
Curtiss Hall
Fine Arts Building, 410 South Michigan Avenue
Free admission

Celebrated pianist Inna Faliks is the founder and curator of the award-winning interdisciplinary series Music/Words, which explores the connections between poetry and music. She is joined by Valzhyna Mort, winner of Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize and the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body, as well as Vera Pavlova, whose first poetry collection in English, If There Is Something to Desire, was a bestselling title in 2010. Works by Gubaidulina, Tchaikovsky, Lera Auerbach, Shchedrin, and Schumann will be performed.

Co-sponsored with PianoForte Foundation and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute

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Poetry off the Shelf
MAKE Magazine: Crosthwaite, Enrigue, Rivera-Garza, and Vaquera-Vásquez
Friday, October 26, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

Join us for a bilingual reading in Spanish and English from Mexican and Mexican American authors Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, Álvaro Enrigue, Cristina Rivera-Garza, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez. These award-winning writers will read original poems and stories, as well as the work of poets who have inspired them. A reception will follow.

Co-sponsored with MAKE Literary Productions and the University of Iowa’s MFA in Spanish Creative Writing

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Harriet Reading Series
Cedar Sigo
Thursday, November 1, 6:30 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

Cedar Sigo is a San Francisco poet and the author of the full-length collections Stranger in Town and Selected Writings, as well as numerous chapbooks. He was raised on the Suquamish reservation near Seattle, Washington, and studied at Naropa with poets Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Alice Notley, and Joanne Kyger, among others. Sigo’s poetry draws on personal experience and a host of cultural material, which is then culled into sculpted lyrical collages. In the past decade, Sigo has collaborated with many visual artists and writers. A reception will follow.

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Poetry off the Shelf
Crazy Brave: The Life and Poetry of Joy Harjo
Sunday, November 4, 12:00 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street

$10/$5 for students and teachers with ID. Tickets go on sale to Chicago Humanities Festival members on Tuesday, September 4, and to the general public on Monday, September 17. 312.494.9509 or chicagohumanities.org

For more than 30 years, poet Joy Harjo, of Muskogee Nation heritage, has evoked the landscape of the Southwest with language steeped in American native cultures and visionary lyricism. Harjo’s many-faceted artistic life includes the poetry collections She Who Had Horse and the American Book Award–winning In Mad Love and War, as well as her new memoir Crazy Brave, and stints playing saxophone in Joy Harjo and the Arrow Dynamics Band.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Humanities Festival

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Poetry off the Shelf
Sijo Poetry
Thursday, November 15, 7 pm
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission

Though less familiar than its Japanese cousin, haiku, Korean sijo has a similarly rich heritage. Like haiku, it employs three lines, although its 40-some syllables are more flexible and allow for narrative developments that aren’t feasible in haiku’s 17-syllable form. Join David McCann, poet, translator, and one of the foremost experts on the form, for an exploration of traditional Korean sijo and the growing body of sijo in English. McCann teaches at Harvard and is the author of four books of poetry, including Urban Temple: Sijo Twisted and Straight, published in Korean translation by Ch’angbi Publishers in Seoul this year. A reception will follow.

Co-sponsored with the Sejong Cultural Society and the Harvard Club of Chicago

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Poetry and Dance
“Word Outleaps the World”: Readings and Dance
Thursday, December 13, 6 pm
Fullerton Hall
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Free with museum admission

Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

                       —Theodore Roethke

In a salute to the Art Institute of Chicago’s new galleries of ancient art, well-known local actors read passages from such authors as Homer, Plotinus, Sophocles, Seneca, and Virgil, while Hubbard Street dancers interpret images and ideas to 
measure the impact of this great literature in
 our own time.

Co-sponsored with Hubbard Street Dance and the Art Institute of Chicago 
 

Poetry Foundation Library

New Library Hours: Monday–Friday, 11 am–4 pm

Poemtime
Note the new time: Wednesdays at 10 am

The Poetry Foundation Library welcomes children ages three to five to a weekly storytime event that introduces poetry through fun, interactive readings and games. Admission is granted on a first come, first served basis.

Field Trips
The Library hosts free field trips for schoolchildren. To learn more or arrange a visit, please contact [email protected].

Library Book Club
September 14, (October, November, December dates TBA), 12:30–1:30 pm
All experience levels are welcome to a monthly book group moderated by library staff. In 2012, the library celebrates Poetry’s centennial by discussing a title from a contributor to that month’s issue. On September 14, the book club discusses Mary Karr’s Sinners Welcome. Space is limited to 15 participants. Please register in advance by emailing [email protected].  
 

Poetry Foundation Gallery

Poet Photos: From the Archives of Poetry Magazine
September 27–November 29

Composed of snapshots sent in by contributors over the 100-year history of Poetry, this exhibition includes unseen treasures from the archives of the magazine.

Snow City Arts: Erasures
December 4–January 3

Snow City Arts transforms time in the hospital into time with the arts for young patients during periods of hospitalization. Exhibited here are 13 works of erasure poetry by youth, who used the May 2011 issue of Poetry as source material for their own erasure poems while being treated at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital in Chicago.

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About Poetry Magazine
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every major contemporary poet. In 2011, the magazine was honored with two National Magazine Awards. It celebrates its centennial in 2012.

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It 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 partnerships, prizes, and programs. Opened to the public in June 2011, the Poetry Foundation building in Chicago provides new space for the Foundation’s extensive roster of public programs and events. It also houses a public garden, a library, and an exhibition gallery as well as the offices of the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine. For more information, please visit poetryfoundation.org.

About the Poetry Foundation Library
The Midwest’s only library dedicated exclusively to poetry, the Poetry Foundation Library exists to promote the reading of poetry in the general public, and to support the editorial needs of all Poetry Foundation programs and staff. Visitors to the library may browse a collection of 30,000 volumes, experience audio and video recordings in private listening booths, and view exhibits of poetry-related materials. In addition to providing public access to its collections in the form of a reading room, the library creates interactive programs to inspire a wider readership for poetry in readers of all ages. The library’s collection aims to present the best poetry, in English or in translation, of the modern and contemporary era, as well as including representative selections of the major poetic works of all eras. A children’s collection contains a range of titles to engage young readers.

POETRY FOUNDATION | 61 West Superior Street | Chicago, IL 60654 | 312.787.7070