Events

Poetry Off the Shelf:
Valerie Martínez & Silvia Curbelo

Jazz Showcase
806 South Plymouth Court
Free admission

Valerie Martínez is a poet, teacher, translator, playwright, librettist, editor, and collaborative artist. Her first book of poetry, Absence, Luminescent (Four Way Books, 1999), won the Larry Levis Prize and a Greenwall Grant from the Academy of American Poets after being a finalist in the Walt Whitman, National Poetry Series, and Intro Award competitions. Her second book, World to World, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2004. Martínez’s translation of the poetry of Uruguay’s Delmira Agustini (1886–1914), A Flock of Scarlet Doves, was published in special edition by Sutton Hoo Press in 2005. A book-length poem, Each and Her, is out this year, as is her collection of Santa Fe poems (written during her tenure as poet laureate of Santa Fe), And They Called It Horizon. Her poems have also appeared in various anthologies of contemporary poetry, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets—A Breadloaf Anthology, and American Poetry—Next Generation. She is the executive director and core artist with Littleglobe, an artist-run nonprofit that collaborates with communities in creating public works of art, installation, and performance as well as producing smaller-scale artist collaborations.

Silvia Curbelo is the author of three collections of poetry: The Geography of Leaving (Silverfish Review Press), The Secret History of Water (Anhinga Press), and Ambush (Main Street Rag). Among her many laurels are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Arts Council, and the Cintas Foundation, as well as the Jessica Nobel Maxwell Memorial Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review and the James Wright Award from Mid-American Review. Her poems have been published in literary journals and more than two dozen anthologies, including The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry, Snakebird: Thirty Years of Anhinga Poets, and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. A native of Matanzas, Cuba, she lives in Tampa, Florida, where she is managing editor for Organica magazine.

Co-sponsored with the Guild Complex and Letras Latinas

Multi-poet Lotería reading with Roddy Lumsden

Ludington Building
1104 South Wabash Street
Free admission

Poetry magazine, contratiempo, and the Center for Book & Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago present a themed “multi-poet” event featuring Roddy Lumsden and two dozen Chicago-based writers reading works in conversation with the Center’s current exhibition, Mano/Mundo/Corazón: Artists Interpret La Lotería (the Mexican game of chance, played with pictographic cards and associated riddles).

Roddy Lumsden has published five books of poetry, most recently Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems and Third Wish Wasted. A sixth collection, Terrific Melancholy, is due in 2011. Originally from Scotland, Lumsden lives in London where he is a Core Tutor for the Poetry School and commissioning editor for Salt Publishing.

Poetry Off the Shelf: Seeing Things
Franz Wright

Fullerton Hall
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Free admission

Through his 14 collections, Franz Wright has written sharply perceptive, keenly felt poems that attest to his ability to shape revelation from darkness and transform the past into a luminous present. Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (Knopf, 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His collections, God’s Silence and Earlier Poems, were published by Knopf in 2006 and 2007, respectively; Knopf also released his newest book, Wheeling Motel. His other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). Wright has also translated poems by René Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 2008 he and his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, co-translated a collection by the Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, Factory of Tears. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas, and is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then
its transformation from childhood to old age—
—from “The Face”
 
We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished
even this, the holiness of things
precisely as they are, and never will!
—from “Prescience”

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago

Poetry Day
Frank Bidart

Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
Harold Washington Library Center
400 South State Street
Free admission

Now in its 56th year, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished reading series in the country. Inaugurated by Robert Frost, Poetry Day has featured such poets as T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, and Adrienne Rich.

In a career spanning 30 years, Frank Bidart has established himself as one of the most original and compelling poets of his generation. Initially influenced by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and later by his teacher Robert Lowell, Bidart has expanded the possibilities of poetry. His unflinching examination of human desire and guilt, often as manifested in deviant or distraught personalities, has opened once-taboo territories. His nonlinear, magpie forms, as well as his typography and punctuation are dictated by the unusual content of his lines rather than convention. Bidart is the author of eight critically acclaimed collections, including, most recently, Desire, Star Dust, and Watching the Spring Festival (all from Farrar Straus & Giroux). Desire was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received his second Pulitzer nomination for Music Like Dirt, the only chapbook ever to be so honored. He won the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award in 1997, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2000, and the Bollingen Prize in 2007. A past chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Frank Bidart has taught at Wellesley College since 1972.

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make
—from “Lament for the Makers”

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library

Poetry on Stage:
The Misanthrope by Molière, translated by Richard Wilbur

Richard Christiansen Studio at Victory Gardens
2433 North Lincoln Avenue
773.871.3000
Tickets $20; $10 students

Hardly a year has gone by in over two centuries that has not seen numerous productions of The Misanthrope, making it one of the most enduring comedies of all time. Richard Wilbur's translation of Molière’s comic masterpiece is in rhymed verse. We meet afresh Alceste (the title character), his friends, and his fiancée. The outspoken Alceste finds them all vain, hypocritical, and insincere, while his own comic flaw lies in considering himself flawless. Bernard Sahlins directs a cast of talented Chicago actors in this staged reading.

My God! It chills my heart to see the ways
Men come to terms with evil nowadays;
Sometimes, I swear, I’m moved to flee and find
Some desert land unfouled by humankind.

Poetry Off the Shelf:
John Balaban & Le Pham Le

Ruggles Hall
The Newberry Library
60 West Walton Street
Free admission

John Balaban is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, been selected for the National Poetry Series, and earned two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New & Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Balaban is a translator of Vietnamese poetry and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association, as well as a poet-in-residence and professor of English in the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Born in Vietnam, Le Pham Le attended the University of Pedagogy in Saigon, where she earned a BA in Vietnamese language and literature. After teaching high school for five years, she left her country with her family during the fall of South Vietnam. Her first publication is a bilingual collection of Vietnamese poems entitled Gio Thoi Phuong Nao/From Where the Wind Blows (Vietnamese International Poetry, 2003).

Poetry Off the Shelf: Seeing Things
Naomi Shihab Nye

Fullerton Hall
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Free admission

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 35 years traveling the country and the world leading workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Her numerous books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006). Other works include seven prize-winning poetry anthologies for young readers, including This Same Sky, The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, and What Have You Lost? Her collection of poems for young adults entitled Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category.

Naomi Shihab Nye has received many awards for her work, and has held fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim Foundations as well as the Library of Congress. She is a regular columnist for Organica magazine and poetry editor for the Texas Observer. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, The Language of Life with Bill Moyers and The United States of Poetry, and also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. In January 2010 she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
—from “Famous”

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago

Poetry Off the Shelf:
Thomas Lynch: Bodies in Motion and at Rest

Thorne Auditorium
Northwestern University School of Law
375 East Chicago Avenue
312.494.9509 or www.chicagohumanities.org
Tickets $5; free for students and teachers with ID
Tickets go on sale to Chicago Humanities Festival members on Tuesday, September 7, and to the general public on Monday, September 20

“There is nothing like the sight of a dead human body to assist the living in separating the good days from the bad ones. Of this truth I have some experience,” writes Thomas Lynch in Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality. Lynch is the author of three collections of poems and three books of essays. A book of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions, and a new collection of poems, Walking Papers, were published this year. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, the New York Times, the Times of London, the New Yorker, and Paris Review. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, County Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage. In this program, Lynch reads from his work and reflects on his unusual perspective as poet and undertaker, and what this duality brings to his writing. After a reading, Lynch will be interviewed by the president of the Poetry Foundation, John Barr.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Humanities Festival

Poetry Off the Shelf: Seeing Things
Idylls of the King

Fullerton Hall
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Free admission

British photographer Julia Cameron’s 19th-century tableaux of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King are brought to life with images, verse, and music. Actor/playwright Christopher Cartmill directs and performs, assisted by actor Mary Ernster.

But I was first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their Head,
In that fair Order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.
— Guinevere, in Idylls of the King

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago

Poetry on Stage: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas

Richard Christiansen Studio at Victory Gardens
2433 North Lincoln Avenue
773.871.3000
Tickets $20; $10 students

Just a month before his tragic death at age 39, Dylan Thomas completed this radio play about a town called Llareggub (say it backwards). The inhabitants of this small Welsh town by the sea (Thomas loved small towns by the sea) are, to say the least, a colorful bunch of eccentrics who, in a work of great poetic beauty, decide to cordon off Llareggub from the “sane world.” Bernard Sahlins directs a cast of talented Chicago actors in this staged reading.