Twenty years ago, I began assembling a compendium called 1922: A Simultaneous Anthology, which would have included works (written and/or published in that year in magazines or monographs) by such authors as: Anna Akhmatova, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Mahatma Ghandi, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Lu Xun, Mina Loy, Osip Mandelstam, Katherine Mansfield, Claude McKay, Gabriela Mistral, Italo Svevo, Gertrude Stein, Rabindranath Tagore, César Vallejo, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Mohammed Yamin, and more than 25 other poets, writers and thinkers. Though life intervened on its completion, I’ve remained fascinated by the synergy of that year, which seemed to announce the possibility of our being more synchronously and (as John Ashbery, himself born in the 1920s, once put it) “sympathetically alive.”

Ninety years ago, in May 1931, the Woodberry Poetry Room first opened its doors. When the library was founded, it represented the convergence of many technological, cultural, and socio-political movements, which we will explore (in articles and oral histories) throughout the coming year. Just as the Poetry Room did not come into being in an historical vacuum, this anniversary be considered apart from the time in which we find ourselves—in the midst of a global pandemic and of a renewed outcry for social justice (what Harvard professor Vincent Brown has called “America’s everlasting not-yet”). During this unusual anniversary year, the Poetry Room is committed to finding ways to engage and uplift our audiences, through a range of virtual events that continue our mission to “live the questions now…..” Our 90th anniversary season of events will begin in March-April 2021 with online readings by Sonia Sanchez, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Anne Boyer, Lyn Hejinian, and Claudia Rankine (with an introduction by Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and will culminate in 2022—pending permission to host large in-person events again—with an …

“It’s time to live in all the rooms….”  We are proud to present our Fall 2020 season of virtual events, featuring readings, talks, and performances by Cathy Park Hong (in conversation with Maggie Nelson), Etel Adnan, Alice Notley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Cecilia Vicuña, a roundtable on “Ralph Ellison at Harvard,” and more. All events are free and open to the public (with a maximum capacity of 500 attendees). To attend, all you need to do is register by following the link under each event on our Website (a Zoom link and password will be emailed to you). And, in an effort to foster the same warm and welcoming environment as our in-person programs, we will be dedicating the first 10 minutes of each event to an informal, friendly Meet-and-Greet, which will allow audience members to say “hello” before the official program begins.  To be added to our Mailing List, email us at poetryrm@fas.harvard.edu. Upcoming events are also publicized via Facebook and Twitter.