Monday Muse: Lannan Poetry Readings

Tuesday, September 30, marks the start of the 2014-15 series of Lannan Readings at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. All of the poetry events are free and open to the public and all take place at 8:00 p.m., on campus in the Copley Formal Lounge (37th & O Sts., N.W.).

Today's post spotlights the readings this fall, September through November. A post highlighting readings by poets in February 2015 will appear at a later date.

✭ Beginning the series is poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose The Ground: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) was awarded the 2013 Whiting Writers' Award and the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, among other prizes.

In the beginning was this surface. A wall. A beginning.

Tonight it coaxed musk from a Harlem cloud bank. It freestyled

A smoke from a stranger's coat. It stole thinned gin.

It was at the edge of its beginnings [....]

~ from "Tonight" in The Ground

We'd cut school like knives through butter, the three

Of us—Peter, Stephen and I—to play

Just about all the music we knew, [....]

~ from "Boys"

An associate professor at Stony Brook University, Phillips also is a critic (When Blackness Rhymess with Backness, Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), translator, and novelist. His work has appeared in such publication as Granta, The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America ("In Their Own Words" series), The New Republic, and The New Yorker.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips Profiles at Blue Flower Arts and The Poetry Foundation 

✭ English poet, lecturer, and editor Jo Shapcott reads on Tuesday evening, October 14. Shapcott has published, most recently, Of Mutability (Faber and Faber, Ltd., 2010), Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (Faber and Faber, 2004),  and Her Book Poems 1988-98 (Faber and Faber, 2000).

It's as easy to make an antibubble in 

your own kitchen

as it is to open up a crease in language

and reveal what you couldn't say

yesterday. [....]

~ from "Deft" in Of Mutability

Among Shapcott's writing awards are a Forward Prize for Best Collection (2010), a Costa Book of the Year Award (2010), a Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (2011), and a Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection (1989).

Videos of Shapcott Reading Her Poems

Jo Shapcott Profiles at British Council Literature, Faber and Faber, Poetry Archive, and The Poetry Foundation

✭ The second of two readings announced for October takes place with Eileen Myles on Tuesday, October 28. The author of more than 20 books, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays, Myles was honored in 2010 with The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award.

[...] You are too intact

the dappled sunlight on the law

or pots of darkness

like salt [....]

~ from "Choke" in Snowflake / different streets

Myles's most recent poetry collection, a double volume, is Snowflake / different streets (Wave Poetry, 2012).

Eileen Myles Profiles at Academy of American Poets and The Poetry Foundation

✭ A double-header is planned for Tuesday evening, November 11, when Natalie Diaz and Rigoberto Gonzalez read.

Recipient of the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Natalie Diaz, a Native American, has been published in Drunken Boat, Gwarlingo, Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other literary periodicals. Her debut collection is When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), winner of a 2013 American Book Award.

Love is a pound of sticky raisins

packed tight in black and white

government boxes [....]

~ from "Why I Hate Raisins" in When My Brother Was an Aztec

Natalie Diaz Profiles at Academy of American Poets, Copper Canyon Press, The Poetry Foundation, and Poetry Society of America

Rigoberto Gonzalez, recipient of a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and other literary awards, is the author of four poetry collections, including Unpeopled Eden (Four Way, 2013) and Black Blossoms (Four Way, 2011), and nine books of prose, among them novels, a memoir, and  two bilingual books for children. He is on the faculty at Newark College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers.

The nightclub's neon light glows red with anxiety

as I wait on the turning lane. Cars blur past,

their headlights white as charcoal.

I trust her driver not to swerve. I trust each stranger

not to kill me [....]

~ from "Other Fugitives and Other Strangers" 

in Other Fugitives and Other Strangers

Rigoberto Gonzalez Profiles at Academy of American Poets and The Poetry Foundation