“What is it I’m turning toward in turning toward you?” Julie Carr, Mónica de la Torre, and Anna Moschovakis discuss intimacy, feminism, and the act of confession in epistolary poetry from Lorine Niedecker, Jack Spicer, Bernadette Mayer, Mark McMorris, and others. Audience members will be invited to write “letters” as a form of response to the panelists and then to read them aloud, initiating dialogue.

Poet Cedar Sigo, editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, a collection of 40 years of interviews, letters, poems, and journals from the remarkable poet Joanne Kyger, pays tribute to his former Naropa Institute mentor.

Joanne Kyger (1934–2017) was one of the major poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, with overlapping ties to prominent Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School poets. She published over 30 books of poetry and prose.

Poets Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Ballard, Edmund Berrigan, Anselm Berrigan, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Norma Cole, Lisa Jarnot, Hettie Jones, Vincent Katz, Filip Marinovich, Tenaya Nasser-Frederick, Ed Sanders, Cedar Sigo, Jared Stanley, Kendra Sullivan, Stacy Szymaszek, Lewis Warsh, and Joey Yearous-Algozin celebrate Joanne Kyger’s lasting influence and pay tribute to one of the great voices in American poetry.

Poets House invites audiences to journey around the world with the International Writing Program (IWP), the nation’s unique conduit for the world’s literatures. Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, (Somalia/Italy), Maung Day, (Myanmar), and Vladimir Martinovski, (Macedonia), together with alumnae Amanda Lee Koe, (Singapore) and Natasha Tiniacos, (Venezuela), join IWP in celebrating its 50th year in an evening of readings and conversation about poetry around the globe.

Poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke discusses the poetics and politics of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Reading from Brooks’ early and late poetry, Clarke examines Brooks’ contributions to a radical black practice of poetry and her representations of the black working class in A Street in Bronzeville and The Near-Johannesburg Boy.

Presented as a part of Our Miss Brooks 100

First published in 1968, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania is one of poetry’s germinal texts, educating generations of writers and readers to the multiple possibilities for poetry throughout the world. Fifty years later, Technicians of the Sacred still delights readers with its ability to excite discovery and expand the notion of the genre.

Mary Jo Bang will discuss her new book A Doll for Throwing, for which she invented a ventriloquized persona that incorporates historical figures from the Bauhaus movement (among them, Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy), personal interiority, biography, and sheer invention. She will also describe her use of artworks and other material as the basis for imagined stage sets, from which speakers address aspects of the world from which they were drawn and urgent issues of the present.

Poet Pattie McCarthy, known for re-visioning historical texts, joins living legend and 2017 Robert Frost Medal recipient Susan Howe on the occasion of her 80th birthday for an evening of readings and conversation. Howe is the author of multiple poetry collections, including That This, The Midnight, Kidnapped, The Europe of Trusts, and, most recently, Debths. Celebrated for her historical eye and innovative verse, Howe remains one of the preeminent voices of her generation.

A Reading and Conversation with Bei Dao, Sharmistha Mohanty, Daouda Ndiaye, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Zhai Yongming and Raúl Zurita. Hosted by Anne Waldman.