Poems 4 Friday:

Readings by Faculty,

Students, and Staff,

2002-03

as part of the

Luther Poetry Project

 

As part of the 2002-04 Jones Professorship, Carol Gilbertson planned a series of Friday afternoon readings at 4:00 p.m. in Luther's Farwell Lounge. In each case, a group of faculty, staff, and students read published poems on a certain theme or by particular poets. The readings held in Fall Semester 2002 were the following (with the program listings below):

October 4: Disparate Voices: Poems in Celebration of Cultural Richness. Faculty and staff from diverse global backgrounds introduced and read powerful poems evoking their traditions and cultures. Participants selected poems that evoked their culture or cultural issues and read them in English as well as in their original language.

October 25: The Spin of Song: Poems of Rumi. Caroline Banks (Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work) and Raymundo Rosales (Student Academic Support Service) read the poems of Rumi, a thirteenth-century Muslim Sufi mystic.

November 1: Halloween Poems: The Gothic, the Tricks, and the Treats. Faculty, staff, and students read nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gothic poems, as well as poems that respond to, or even toy with, the Gothic themes of vulnerable young females, strong male sexual aggressors, and dark, shadowy Gothic architecture as a metaphor for human unconscious desires.

November 15: American Voices: Whitman and Dickinson. Poems by these two quintessential American poets, who have distinctively different voices, both of them authentic and passionate, read by students from this semester's American Literature class and Whitman seminar.

 

 

November 22: What We Do . . . As a Faculty. A reading designed for the faculty on the issues involved in teaching. Faculty from a range of disciplines read poems by Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Tom Wayman, Dana Gioia, Stephen Dunn, Howard Nemerov, David Young, and Lucille Clifton on the intellectual life, our disciplinary models, the limits of language, and the vocation--as well as the trials and errors--of teaching.

January 9: The Poet in his Own Voice. A reading by Guest Poet and Vocation Visitor (Sense of Vocation Program) Michael Carey, a poet, editor, and farmer who is originally from New York but who now actively farms in Southwest Iowa. Carey is editor of the Loess Hills Books press.

January 24: Drama in the Garden: Readings from Milton's Paradise Lost. Students from the January Term class Milton and the Seventeenth Century did a dramatic reading of selections from Milton's dramatic and powerful Christian epic.

February 14: Hearts and Bodies: Valentine Poems. A reading by students in the spring 2003 Poems for Life class of poems by a range of poets about love, touch, parting, loss, and duration.

February 28: Deep Like Rivers: Poems Celebrating African-American Life and History. A reading by students and faculty to commemorate Black History Month. Poems about Africa, slavery, terror, civil rights struggle, urban life, heroes, music, and the dignity of being black.

March 13: Mapping Our Lives: Poems by Women Poets. An event for Women's History Month in which female faculty, staff, and students each read favorite poems by women poets.

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