On Sunday October 18th at 4:00 pm the second program in the Lenox Library’s Distinguished Lecture Series will focus on the question: Can Poetry Save the Earth? Professor John Felstiner author of Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems will argue that as we hover on the environmental point of no return, poetry may have the singular capacity to return our attention to our environment before it is too late.
In his book, Felstiner takes a historical look at how poetry has influenced our admiration and care for the natural world. He presents those poets who have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world ranging from Blake and Whitman to Valcott and Gary Snyder. In the preface of his book, Felstiner explains why we still need poetry today:
“Can poems help, when times demand environmental science and history, governmental leadership, corporate and consumer moderation, nonprofit activism, local initiatives? Why call on the pleasures of poetry, when the time has come for an all out response? … Because we are what the beauty and force of the poems reach toward, we’ve a chance to recognize and lighten our footprint in a world where all of nature matters vitally (xiii).”
After his lecture and readings from his book, Professor Felstiner will be available to sign copies of Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems which will be for sale at this event courtesy of The Bookstore in Lenox.
Remember, this program is FREE and open to everyone.
A Short Biography of the Author, John Felstiner
John Felstiner started teaching at Stanford in 1965. He has also taught at the University of Chile, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Yale University. Teaching North American poetry in Chile in 1967-68 led to Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), which won the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. This experience initiated Felstiner’s ongoing concern with the practice of literary translation.
During the 1970s Prof. Felstiner developed critical approaches to poetry by civilians and soldiers from the Vietnam era, and after teaching at the Hebrew University in Israel (1974-75), he began studying the literature, art, photography, and music that emerged from the European Jewish catastrophe. His book on the German-speaking Jewish poet, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, and won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 1997. His Norton anthology of Celan’s work won MLA, ATA, and PEN prizes. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Distinguished Lecture Series has been organized and is hosted by
Prof. Jeremy Yudkin of Lenox.
All programs in the Distinguished Lecture Series are FREE and open to the public thanks to the generosity of the following sponsors:
Mary Nash Consulting
The Barefoot Gardener Company, LLC
For further information, contact:
Denis Lesieur at 413-637-2630 or dlesieur@lenoxlib.org