This talk considers the varieties of dissemination, material storage and data loss that contemporary poets encounter and recent aesthetic response s to technological memory and erasure.

Applications must be received by February 23

Elizabeth Arnold explores the Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908-1984), whose towering avant-garde oeuvre combines sincerity of observation with a consistent moral imperative.

Carbibbean writer M Nourbese Philip has observed that "poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie--the artifice of form--to tell those truths." In this fascinating dialogue, Misani elicits Philip's ideas about poetry, the nature of truth and the construction of personal and national identity.

Poet and Shakespeare scholar Martha Ronk invites aficionados and first-timers to revel in the bard's rhetoric and discover the correlations between Elizabethan and contemporary poetics.

This festival offers a refreshing perspective on one of the most popular and infinitely flexible forms in the Western tradition.

2:00pm: Lyric Sublime and the Problem of Beauty
David Baker and Linda Gregerson trace the evolution of the lyric sublime from its Greek and Latin origins to its modern modes.