Date(s): Wednesday, March 21
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: : Abbotsford Campus, A225

Poetry Now: A lecture with Miriam Nichols

Please join Miriam Nichols for a lecture on:

Poetry Now: Memory, Measure, and Meaning for the 21st Century
“. . . folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects . . . they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.”
–Walt Whitman, “Preface to Leaves of Grass,” 1855

Poetry is that peculiar human discourse situated between fact and value, history and philosophy, story and idea. What I will call “big poetry” in this talk is creative thinking that negotiates between these contrasting pairs on a grand scale. Traditionally, poetry of such range was a repository of cultural memory, ethical judgement, and social meaning as expressed in tales and epic poems like the Iliad, The Odyssey, the Ramayana, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and the Trickster stories. Today, however, such traditional knowledge has become problematic because people of any given community do not necessarily share a cultural history or a set of values. This has left us with many local narratives and discipline specific discourses but few means of taking on questions of common concern, even though we share a shrinking planet. In a world fraught with rapid technological change and competing reality claims (harvest or slaughter, pipeline or sacred space?), the stakes of cultivating an imagination for global dwelling could not be higher. This talk is about the possibility of new forms of “big poetry” for the 21st century and the importance of cultural memory to the educated imagination.