MFA Residency: Thursday, July 9th

Public Event Schedule
9:30 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
Kevin McIlvoy: DESINENCE
In this lecture I will concentrate upon the work of Henry David Thoreau, specifically the journal in which he uniquely accomplishes his poetic expression and his natural storytelling. Thoreau’s literary contributions, which defy categorization into genres, mark all of American literature that reckons with the tragic and comic moments in which one attempts to reconcile spiritual and savage impulses, the paradoxes when one attempts to “let his mind descend into his body.” While reflecting upon Thoreau’s generative journal-keeping methods and his storytelling and poetry, I will specifically comment on what his work teaches us about the writer’s approaches to desinence, the coming-to-an-end moment. This is an “answering” lecture to my long-ago lecture on “imminence” (the about-to-be moment).
To prepare for this lecture, saunter.

 

10:45 AM
Ransom Fellowship Hall
Alan Shapiro: On Convention and Self-Expression
Convention and self-expression are often thought of as mutually exclusive or at least antagonistically related. In this lecture I hope to show how impersonal conventions and personality are or can be not only mutually entailing, not mutually exclusive, but that the very notion of self is inconceivable apart of the impersonal means by which self is expressed. Along the way we’ll look at poems by Philip Larkin, Ben Jonson, J.V. Cunningham, Dan Pagis and Natalie Diaz.

Then join us at 8:15pm in Ransom Fellowship Hall for a reading featuring graduating students:
Anu Bharadwaj
Noah Friedman
Leslie Koffler
Lesley Valdes
Catherine Meeks
For more information, including a full schedule of public events, please visit the program website at http://wwcmfa.org/.