Poetry Lecture Series with Prof. Soltan

Have you taken a class with Professor Soltan yet? If not, you’re missing out! Come see what all the hype is about!
Honors Professor Margaret Soltan will be doing a three-part lecture series at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library in celebration of National Poetry Month. We encourage you to attend Saturday April 2nd, 9th, and 16th, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Lecture One: Winter kept us warm: Poetry as Paradox April 2, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
In a year that began with a great blizzard in Washington, we’ll look first in this lecture series at what poetry makes of the snow: as an image, a symbol, a mood, a setting.  We’ll focus on three poems – T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Louis MacNeice’s Snow, and Hayden Carruth’s The Curtain – and ask not only what sort of utterance poetry is, but also what it offers us intellectually and emotionally as we experience the power of nature.
Lecture Two: Stirring dull roots with spring rain: Poetry as Life Itself April 9, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
April is the month of these lectures; April is National Poetry Month; April marks the renewal of life in the spring season.  That all sounds great, yet Eliot calls April “the cruellest month.”  Our focus in this lecture will be James Schuyler’s exuberantly long poem, Hymn to Life, which is set in Washington DC in the spring.
Lecture Three: Flying off into nothing: Poetry as Death April 16, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Our final two poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall, and Sylvia Plath’s Berck-Plage, complete our seasonal exploration of what poetry is, and what it can do by way of clarifying our relationship to our lives in nature.