Poetry Off the Shelf: Seeing Things Czeslaw Milosz’s Luminous Things

Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz’s classic anthology, A Book of Luminous Things, serves as a source for celebrating poems about “things” by a diverse range of writers, from ancient Chinese sages to 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams. Live music by Yang Wei complements the images and poems.

Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and
   an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
    —From “Incantation,” by Czeslaw Milosz,
       translated by Milosz and Robert Pinsky

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago