Events

Poetry on Stage: Lysistrata

Victory Gardens Studio
2433 North Lincoln Avenue
(773) 871-3000
Tickets $20; $10 for students

Aristophanes’ comic masterpiece Lysistrata was performed in Athens in 411 B.C.E., the 20th year of the bloody Peloponnesian War. In the play the women of Athens, led by Lysistrata, decide that enough is enough: they will deny sex to their husbands until they end the war, a tactic that turns out to be as frustrating to them as to their mates. The Greeks had few language taboos and no problems with phallic imagery. These characteristics add to the startling humor and poignancy of the play, even in our uncensored age. Bernard Sahlins directs a cast of Chicago’s finest actors in a staged reading.

Third Coast Filmless Festival

Third Coast Filmless Festival
The Museum of Contemporary Art
Kanter Meeting Center
220 East Chicago Avenue
www.thirdcoastfestival.org
Tickets $8; festival passes available

The second annual Third Coast Filmless Festival celebrates storytelling, sound, and the art of listening. The festival features a series of audio “screenings,” and each screening explores a theme. Stories such as Responsibility in Metaphor by poet Tony Hoagland and Pumpernickel by poet Philip Schultz draw strength from the elegance of words, the music of voice, and the rhythms of life. Producer Lu Olkowski will be on hand for a question-and-answer session following the screening.  
 
Co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, American Airlines, Chicago’s Navy Pier, and the ESB Institute for the Study of Women and Gender at Columbia College Chicago.

Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker

Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission

Few poets writing today are so closely identified with a place as is David Baker, who makes his particular locale—the Midwest—into a mirror for the human experience on a universal level. Baker currently holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where he is a professor of English. He also serves as poetry editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches regularly in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His most recent book is Never-Ending Birds (W.W. Norton, 2009).

Poetry Off the Shelf: Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, with the Nobel committee citing his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” Since the 1950s Walcott has divided his time between Boston, New York, and his native Saint Lucia. His work resonates with Western canon and island influences, sometimes even shifting between Caribbean patois and English, and often addressing his English and West Indian ancestry. He has published 10 books of poetry, including The Prodigal, The Bounty, and Omeros. His forthcoming collection is White Egrets.

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago

Poetry Off the Shelf: Indigo Moor and Cave Canem Fellows

Jazz Showcase
806 South Plymouth Court
Dearborn Station
Free admission

Indigo Moor’s second collection, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, is the inaugural winner of the Cave Canem–Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. It is a sustained and impressive dialogue with the visual arts, history, the natural world, and the poet’s dreams and nightmares. Always in motion, Moor’s polyrhythmic lines are choreographed to make sense of all that is most elusive in meaning: music, violence, love, anger, and desire. His first book of poetry, Tap-Root, was published in 2006 as part of the Main Street Rags Editors Select Poetry Series. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate member of the Artists Residency Institute for Teaching Artists.

Co-sponsored with Cave Canem and Northwestern University Press

The Practice of Poetry: An Intimate Discussion/Workshop with Sam Hamill

Unity Temple
875 Lake Street
Oak Park, Illinois
Tickets $20

Sam Hamill is the author of more than 40 books, including 15 volumes of original poetry, most recently Measured by Stone and Almost Paradise: New & Selected Poems & Translations; four collections of literary essays, including A Poet’s Work and Avocations: On Poetry & Poets; and some of the most distinguished translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese classics of the last half-century. He co-founded, and for 32 years was editor, at Copper Canyon Press. Hamill also taught in prisons for 14 years and has worked extensively with battered women and children.

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. and the Social Mission Committee of Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

An Evening of Poetry with Sam Hamill

Unity Temple
875 Lake Street
Oak Park, Illinois
Tickets $9

This is a unique opportunity to spend an evening with one of the major poets and cultural forces of our time. First Lady Laura Bush invited Sam Hamill to the White House in 2003 for an evening celebrating American poetry on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, the president having just outlined his plans for shock and awe. Hamill declined the invitation and extended his own invitation to fellow poets to speak for the conscience of our country. The result was Poets Against War and the compilation of over 20,000 poems in opposition to war. Hamill has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mellon Fund, and has won the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. and the Social Mission Committee of Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation.

Poetry Off the Shelf: Cornelius Eady

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

Many of Cornelius Eady’s poems contain a musical quality drawn from blues and jazz, and allude to traditional African American hymns as well as to the compositions of modern musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. His published works include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist. Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2008 and was nominated for a NAACP Image Award. In 1996 Eady and poet Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization that supports emerging African American poets. At present he is an associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library

Disturb the Universe: American Moderns Abroad and at Home

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

American artists such as Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe echoed writers who were responding to European innovations by crafting their own landmark contributions to Modernism. This reading, presented by Goodman Theatre actors, features works by T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes.

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago

Poetry on Stage: The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney

Victory Gardens Studio
2433 North Lincoln Avenue
(773) 871-3000
Tickets $20; $10 for students

The personal and the political collide in Sophocles’ play when the Greeks abandon their wounded comrade, Philoctetes, only to find that they need his bow to bring their long war with the Trojans to an end. Seamus Heaney’s powerful 1991 translation weighs the value of personal integrity against loyalty to one’s community and highlights this ancient tragedy’s provocative resonances with the troubles in Northern Ireland and our own conflict in Iraq. Bernard Sahlins directs a cast of Chicago’s finest actors in a staged reading.