This Friday and Saturday, the University of Southern Mississippi will welcome poets Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, David Kirby, and Barbara Hamby for the 2014 Moorman Symposium.
I am glad!
My professor, Angela Ball, the university’s 2013-2015 Moorman Distinguished Professor of English, is the funny and erudite force behind this symposium that will celebrate poetry and poets from the 1950s and 1960s.
Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler were named “Poets of the New York School” in analogy with their friends and sometime collaborators, the New York School of Painters. Several years ago, Angela began to see flashes of their work in poems by poets from pastoral regions, like Mississippi. With that, she began a class for graduate students in the Center for Writers with a focus on The New York School of Poetry.
I’ve been lucky enough to take part in Angela’s class and can testify to how much is learned (and just thoroughly enjoyed, laughed at) by taking these city poets out of the city and witnessing their influence in the South. The idea for the 2014 Moorman Symposium, which will explore the similarities between poets of the South and Poets of the New York School, was born from doing just this.
Duhamel, Kirby, and Hamby are award-winning poets living in the South and writing New York School-inflected works. Lehman, a distinguished poet and a vital commentator on The New York School of Poetry, will also play a key role in the symposium.
As the featured poet on Friday night, Collins will read some of his humorous and playful poetry.
Schedule of symposium events:
May 2nd – 2 pm, panel discussion
(brilliant questions, answers & laughter)
- 7 pm, a reading by Billy Collins
(socks-being-knocked-off-edness & laughter)
May 3rd – 2 pm informal Q&A session
(more brilliant questions, more laughter)
-7 pm, poetry reading featuring Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, David Kirby and Barbara Hamby
(laughter version of multiple orgasms)
Did I mention these events will be funny (and free and open to the public)?
“We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying” - O'Hara
Come if you’d like everything you’ve ever wanted!
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