BRANCHING OUT FRESNO: CARL PHILLIPS ON WALT WHITMAN

Walt Whitman and the American Voice
In his talk, Carl Phillips will explore the ways in which Whitman is among the first to stake out forbidden territory (race, masculinity, morality) for American poetry and to find a form that persuasively enacts the poem's content. He will also consider the ways in which Whitman's poems continue to have a contemporary resonance and to illustrate what it has meant and continues to mean, on so many levels, to be American, for better and for worse.

Admission is free

Woodward Park Library
944 E. Perrin (Perrin at Champlain)
Fresno, CA

For more information call Jeanne Johnson at 559-488-3856.

BRANCHING OUT HARTFORD: SUSAN STEWART ON ANNA AKHMATOVA

Akhmatova, Poet of the Future
Anna Akhmatova, sometimes called 'the poet who buried Stalin' was a writer who pursued her work under extreme conditions of state oppression. She has come to represent the persistence of poetic conscience in the twentieth century. This lecture will look more closely at Akhmatova's poems, from her early love lyrics to her final masterpiece Poem Without a Hero, and we will listen to some recordings of Akhmatova's beautiful rhythmic recitations of her work. Her career shows us how poets do not merely follow and reflect the temporary conditions of society and culture under which they live, for poets can create permanent values through their labor of memory and imagination. The work of Anna Akhmatova provides some of the most important evidence we have that poetry has the capacity to shape what we are as human beings and what we will be.

Admission is free

Hartford Public Library
Central Library
500 Main Street
Hartford, CT

For more information call (860) 695-6295.

BRANCHING OUT LITTLE ROCK: MARK DOTY ON E. E. CUMMINGS

Beloved Radical
E. E. Cummings accomplished the rarest of balancing acts: He managed to be both a deeply committed experimentalist and a very popular poet. How does a writer manage to be an innovator, pushing the boundaries of poetic form and content and still connect so powerfully with readers with his serious play? We'll look at the range of Cummings' achievement—his memorable and sensuous love poems, his fierce political satires, his compassionate anatomies of the human situation. It's been said that new technology always influences the writing process, and indeed it's just about impossible to imagine E. E. Cummings without the typewriter, the machine that helped him break words apart and rearrange them in new combinations and collisions, scatter his lines across the page, and—his signature gesture—forget about capital letters.

Admission is free. Reception to follow.

Darragh Center/ Main Library
100 Rock Street
Little Rock, AR

For more information and reservations call 501-918-3032 or email mmurray@cals.org.

BRANCHING OUT SALT LAKE CITY: KAY RYAN ON EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson on Her Own Terms
The greatest iconoclasts don't set out to. Take Emily Dickinson. She just couldn't do some things as others did them. She couldn't seem to manage to get saved despite great pressure from revival-happy Amherst; she couldn't bend her talent to write poems in any way that her time could accept as poems; she couldn't want fame if it meant publishing; she couldn't trade the intensity of her own mind for the busyness beyond her gate. It is thoroughly remarkable to acknowledge that such a person—diminutive, clad in bridelike white, sealed within her rooms, doing no more to broadcast her poems than slipping them in with a batch of ginger bread—will never quit galvanizing American poetry. Her poems will never fit in. However scholars try to show us how they partake of this hymn form or that ballad convention, we know the difference. These poems have a crackedness that breaks all the way down to the original stuff of creation. Reading any but her tamest poems requires a welder's mask; we are in the immediate presence of a mind so intense and jagged, so un-smoothed-over, so hot, that it melts and reforms ordinary words, burns gaps in grammar and can seldom sustain itself for more than a stanza or two. But what a stanza or two. Kay Ryan will discuss Emily Dickinson's life and work.

Admission is free.

The City Library
Main Library Auditorium
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City, UT

For information call: 810-524-8200.

BRANCHING OUT NEW ORLEANS: HETTIE JONES ON BEAT POETS

The Beats Go On
Who were the Beat Poets? Why are they "beat" and what does that mean? A look at their work, and the decades of the fifties and sixties in which they wrote, will explain why they remain iconic figures in American poetry. Their writing was shocking to some yet celebrated by others. Contemporary reaction to their poems was vociferous and divided. Today they continue to be notorious, though there is growing interest in their lively, noisy, exciting work. The Beat goes on!

Admission is free.

New Orleans Public Library
Milton H. Latter Memorial Branch
5120 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA

For more information call 504-596-2625 or e-mail Marsha Howard at marsha@poetshouse.org.

BRANCHING OUT MILWAUKEE: MOLLY PEACOCK ON EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Take Up the Song, Forget the Epitaph
Edna St. Vincent Millay, an elfin, red-haired diva of the sonnet, published some of the wisest, sexiest, and most feminist poetry of the 20th century. From her childhood as caretaker of her siblings in Camden, Maine, to her adolescent near-miss at a national prize for "Renascence" which sparked a national poetry controversy, to her bohemian life in one of Greenwich Village's tiniest brownstones, Millay was as uncompromising in her devotion to the rules of verse as she was in her flaunting of social rules.

The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize at the age of only thirty she reinvigorated a traditional verse form, the sonnet, reclaiming it for a woman's voice. Always politically involved, from protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti case to urging the U.S. to enter World War II to rescue European victims of the Nazis, she remained in the literary spotlight until her death. A spellbinding reader of her poetry, she drew thousands of diehard admirers. Each of her sonnets is a rhythmical, sometimes whimsical, sometimes savagely intense fourteen lines. This lecture uses her sonnet "Love Is Not All" from Fatal Interview as a lens to view Millay's passionate life and ideas as well as to view how this verse form remained vital in the 20th century.

"Take up the song, forget the epitaph" is the phrase from Millay's "Sonnet to Inez Milholland" which is carved into stone in The American Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We'll look at this poem, as well as the free-verse favorite, "Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."

Admission is free.

Milwaukee Public Library
Centennial Hall
733 N. Eighth Street
Milwaukee, WI

For information call 414-286-3000.

BRANCHING OUT HARTFORD: PABLO MEDINA ON OCTAVIO PAZ

The Cosmic Poetry of Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1990, was arguably the most influential Mexican poet and essayist of the 20th century. A man of encyclopedic knowledge and vast intellectual range, he was able to bring together in his poetry four great streams of modernity: the European, the Eastern, the Mexican, and the North American. Paz's second language was French and he was exposed to French literature from an early age in the library of his grandfather's house in Mixcoac, a suburb of Mexico City, where he also experienced and internalized the ancient streams of Mexican culture, itself a mixture of the Native American and the Spanish. Paz's service in his country's diplomatic corps took him to Asia, where he was stationed in Tokyo and New Delhi. Eventually he was named Mexican ambassador to India, a position that exposed him to Indian thought and belief for six years, until, in 1968, he resigned his post in protest over the Mexican government's massacre of students in Santiago Tlatelolco. Throughout his life, Paz spent extended periods of time in the United States, from New England to southern California, absorbing its culture and formulating a unique view of Mexico's neighbor to the North. This talk will explore how these four influences made their way into Paz's work and life as threads of a vivid tapestry, an embodiment, if you will, of what Mexican historian Jose Vasconcelos called "the cosmic race."

Admission is free.

Hartford Public Library
Central Library
500 Main Street
Hartford, CT

For more information call (860) 695-6295.

BRANCHING OUT FRESNO: MOLLY PEACOCK ON EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Take Up the Song, Forget the Epitaph
Edna St. Vincent Millay, an elfin, red-haired diva of the sonnet, published some of the wisest, sexiest, and most feminist poetry of the 20th century. From her childhood as caretaker of her siblings in Camden, Maine, to her adolescent near-miss at a national prize for "Renascence" which sparked a national poetry controversy, to her bohemian life in one of Greenwich Village's tiniest brownstones, Millay was as uncompromising in her devotion to the rules of verse as she was in her flaunting of social rules.

The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize at the age of only thirty she reinvigorated a traditional verse form, the sonnet, reclaiming it for a woman's voice. Always politically involved, from protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti case to urging the U.S. to enter World War II to rescue European victims of the Nazis, she remained in the literary spotlight until her death. A spellbinding reader of her poetry, she drew thousands of diehard admirers. Each of her sonnets is a rhythmical, sometimes whimsical, sometimes savagely intense fourteen lines. This lecture uses her sonnet "Love Is Not All" from Fatal Interview as a lens to view Millay's passionate life and ideas as well as to view how this verse form remained vital in the 20th century.

"Take up the song, forget the epitaph" is the phrase from Millay's "Sonnet to Inez Milholland" which is carved into stone in The American Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We'll look at this poem, as well as the free-verse favorite, "Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."

Admission is free.

Woodward Park Library
944 E. Perrin (Perrin at Champlain)
Fresno, CA

For more information call Jeanne Johnson at 559-488-3856.

BRANCHING OUT LITTLE ROCK: KAY RYAN ON EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson on Her Own Terms
The greatest iconoclasts don't set out to. Take Emily Dickinson. She just couldn't do some things as others did them. She couldn't seem to manage to get saved despite great pressure from revival-happy Amherst; she couldn't bend her talent to write poems in any way that her time could accept as poems; she couldn't want fame if it meant publishing; she couldn't trade the intensity of her own mind for the busyness beyond her gate. It is thoroughly remarkable to acknowledge that such a person—diminutive, clad in bridelike white, sealed within her rooms, doing no more to broadcast her poems than slipping them in with a batch of ginger bread—will never quit galvanizing American poetry. Her poems will never fit in. However scholars try to show us how they partake of this hymn form or that ballad convention, we know the difference. These poems have a crackedness that breaks all the way down to the original stuff of creation. Reading any but her tamest poems requires a welder's mask; we are in the immediate presence of a mind so intense and jagged, so un-smoothed-over, so hot, that it melts and reforms ordinary words, burns gaps in grammar and can seldom sustain itself for more than a stanza or two. But what a stanza or two. Kay Ryan will discuss Emily Dickinson's life and work.

Admission is free. Reception to follow.

Darragh Center/ Main Library
100 Rock Street
Little Rock, AR

For more information and reservations call 501-918-3032 or email mmurray@cals.org.

BRANCHING OUT NEW ORLEANS: MARK DOTY ON E. E. CUMMINGS

Beloved Radical
E. E. Cummings accomplished the rarest of balancing acts: He managed to be both a deeply committed experimentalist and a very popular poet. How does a writer manage to be an innovator, pushing the boundaries of poetic form and content and still connect so powerfully with readers with his serious play? We'll look at the range of Cummings' achievement—his memorable and sensuous love poems, his fierce political satires, his compassionate anatomies of the human situation. It's been said that new technology always influences the writing process, and indeed it's just about impossible to imagine E. E. Cummings without the typewriter, the machine that helped him break words apart and rearrange them in new combinations and collisions, scatter his lines across the page, and—his signature gesture—forget about capital letters.

Admission is free.

New Orleans Public Library
Milton H. Latter Memorial Branch
5120 St. Charles Avenue
New Orleans, LA

For more information call 504-596-2625 or e-mail Marsha Howard at marsha@poetshouse.org.

BRANCHING OUT SALT LAKE CITY: HETTIE JONES ON BEAT POETS

The Beats Go On
Who were the Beat Poets? Why are they "beat" and what does that mean? A look at their work, and the decades of the fifties and sixties in which they wrote, will explain why they remain iconic figures in American poetry. Their writing was shocking to some yet celebrated by others. Contemporary reaction to their poems was vociferous and divided. Today they continue to be notorious, though there is growing interest in their lively, noisy, exciting work. The Beat goes on!

Admission is free.

The City Library
Main Library Auditorium
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City, UT

For information call: 810-524-8200.

BRANCHING OUT JACKSONVILLE: MOLLY PEACOCK ON EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Take Up the Song, Forget the Epitaph
Edna St. Vincent Millay, an elfin, red-haired diva of the sonnet, published some of the wisest, sexiest, and most feminist poetry of the 20th century. From her childhood as caretaker of her siblings in Camden, Maine, to her adolescent near-miss at a national prize for "Renascence" which sparked a national poetry controversy, to her bohemian life in one of Greenwich Village's tiniest brownstones, Millay was as uncompromising in her devotion to the rules of verse as she was in her flaunting of social rules.

The first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize at the age of only thirty she reinvigorated a traditional verse form, the sonnet, reclaiming it for a woman's voice. Always politically involved, from protesting the Sacco and Vanzetti case to urging the U.S. to enter World War II to rescue European victims of the Nazis, she remained in the literary spotlight until her death. A spellbinding reader of her poetry, she drew thousands of diehard admirers. Each of her sonnets is a rhythmical, sometimes whimsical, sometimes savagely intense fourteen lines. This lecture uses her sonnet "Love Is Not All" from Fatal Interview as a lens to view Millay's passionate life and ideas as well as to view how this verse form remained vital in the 20th century.

"Take up the song, forget the epitaph" is the phrase from Millay's "Sonnet to Inez Milholland" which is carved into stone in The American Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We'll look at this poem, as well as the free-verse favorite, "Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies."

Admission is free.

Prime Osborn Convention Center
1000 Water Street
Jacksonville, FL

This program is part of Jacksonville Public Library Foundations annual festival Much Ado About Books.

Information: 904-630-2665.

BRANCHING OUT LITTLE ROCK: EAVAN BOLAND ON W.B. YEATS

Yeats: A Human and Historic Look
Looking at Yeats, though the lens of his finished poems, he can seem a historic poet, almost cast in marble. In fact Yeats was a turbulent, troubled young man who became a passionate and sorrowful older one. His love poems show that. His poems of Ireland show it too. His beautiful language, far from being a monument, is a fever chart of the intensity and hunger with which he lived his life. Ireland and a desperate, unrequited love affair drove his poetry, some of which is the greatest of the twentieth century. So did his fear of old age and his fury at the modern world. This talk looks at the human poet, not simply the historic one.

Admission is free. Reception to follow.

Darragh Center/ Main Library
100 Rock Street
Little Rock, AR

For more information and reservations call 501-918-3032 or email mmurray@cals.org.

BRANCHING OUT MILWAUKEE: MARTÍN ESPADA ON PABLO NERUDA

The Redemption of Pablo Neruda
At each stage of his tumultuous life, Neruda wrote poems as chronicles, explaining his poetry and politics. He also wrote poems about the mysterious power of poetry itself, a power fully embraced in Chilean culture. In his talk Martín Espada will focus on the evolution of Neruda as a political poet, his struggle and exile at the hands of his own government, his triumphant return, his death in the wake of the military coup, and his redemption after democracy returned to Chile.

Admission is free.

Milwaukee Public Library/Centennial Hall
733 N. Eighth Street
Milwaukee, WI

For information call 414-286-3000.

BRANCHING OUT JACKSONVILLE: HETTIE JONES ON BEAT POETS

The Beats Go On
Who were the Beat Poets? Why are they "beat" and what does that mean? A look at their work, and the decades of the fifties and sixties in which they wrote, will explain why they remain iconic figures in American poetry. Their writing was shocking to some yet celebrated by others. Contemporary reaction to their poems was vociferous and divided. Today they continue to be notorious, though there is growing interest in their lively, noisy, exciting work. The Beat goes on!

Admission is free.

Jacksonville Public Library
Main Library
303 N. Laura Street
Jacksonville, FL

For more information please call 904-630-2665.

The PSA and Poets House continue with their joint initiative, Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, presenting talks by poets in the public library systems of eight cities nationwide. See our Spring offerings listed here or visit www.poetrybranchingout.org for more information.