End Date : September 23, 9:00 pm
The Italian Academy
Lydia Liu (Columbia)
Emily Sun (Barnard/Columbia)
Anupama Rao (Barnard/Columbia)
Susan Bernofsky (Columbia)
Peter Connor (Barnard/Columbia)
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Offices of the Provost and the President, Barnard College
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of the Dean of Humanities
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of the Executive Vice President and Dean
Global Cultural Studies
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
Huang and Lin Fund for the Program in Chinese Literature and Culture
The Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies
Middle East Institute
Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Poets House
School of the Arts
The Weatherhead East Asia Institute
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Join us for the inaugural event for the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar in Global Language Justice 2017-2019!
Poets from all corners of the earth have had something to teach us about the life and death of languages. As Carl Sandburg puts it, “words wrapped around your tongue today and broken to the shape of thought now and today…shall be faded hieroglyphics.”
Will the plurality of poetic speech and the diversity of human languages be faded likewise and become obsolete in the not so distant future? If poetry, as language that lends itself to memorization and recitation, arises from the lived worlds of song and ritual incantation, what would happen to human societies when we could no longer sing the song or form emotional attachment to the rich traditions embodied by the plurality of poetic speech around the world?
This two day event will begin with a reading on Friday, September 22, at Columbia University. There is a closed workshop and a public reading at the Poets House on Saturday, September 23.
Friday evening’s presentation will include readings by
Bei Dao, Mohammed Bennis, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Sharmistha Mohanty, Daouda Ndiaye, Anne Waldman, Orlando White, Zhai Yongming, and Raúl Zurita
This event is open to the public. First come, first seated. Seating is limited but the event will be live streamed and the program attached to the webpage as PDF.
The photos for this event are now available. Video footage from the presentation is now available as well.
