Guest Speaker: Harold Bloom

Part of Catalan Poetry Symposium: A Day Long Festival

Join poets and scholars from Catalonia and the United States for all or part of this exploration of eight centuries of Catalan poetry.

Participants: Manuel Forcano, Christopher Whyte, Francesc Parcerisas & Marta Pessarrodona

Part of Catalan Poetry Symposium: A Day Long Festival

Join poets and scholars from Catalonia and the United States for all or part of this exploration of eight centuries of Catalan poetry.

Can visual poetry be translated?
Participants: Sergio Bessa, Melcion Mateu, Hillary Gardner & Francesc Parcerisas

Advance Registration Required. Call 212-431-7920

Steps away from the site of our future home, listen to the poetry and music of a dozen performers, gaze over the splendor of the Manhattan waterfront and celebrate 20 years of Poets House.

Saturday, November 9, 2:00–6:00pm
Sunday, November 10, 10:00am–2:00pm
Application deadline: Friday, October 25

Saturday, October 12, 2:00–6:00pm
Sunday, October 13, 12:00–4:00pm
Application deadline: Friday, October 4

Writers from Petrarch to Millay, from Shakespeare to Frost to Hacker have written sonnets about love, loss, philosophy, sex, war, aging, and every other human concern. This is a workshop for anyone who wants to learn about, or refresh his or her knowledge of, one of the most enduring and flexible poetic forms. The class will cover the essentials of meter and rhyme, and read and discuss sonnets from their inception up through present-day practice and experimentation.

Regardless of stylistic differences, Bashō, John Keats, Pablo Neruda, Li Po, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, and Kay Ryan would all agree on the essential importance of imagery--the poem's power of conveying what the real world looks and feels like as a way of both renewing our experience of the world and getting at the otherwise unsayable.

Emily Dickinson famously said that she knew it was a poem if it knocked the top of her head off. But what if it’s a prose poem? Can something that looks like prose but sounds like poetry have the same impact? The prose poem allows the writer to preserve a poetic diction and proximity to metaphor while stretching out the line and taking on a more direct narrative. It can also achieve a “snapshot” quality, which makes it a form as adventurous in brevity – what’s in focus? what’s lurking half out of sight? – as the essay can be in breadth.