All posts tagged: featured
THE LIVING ARCHIVE: Highlights from Our Recent Acquisitions
Announcing the 2021-2022 WPR Creative Fellowship and Grant
The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipients of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship are Diana Khoi Nguyen and Jane Wong for their collaborative project, “Radical Altars to Alter.” It also gives us immense pleasure to announce that Jonathan C. Creasy has been selected as the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Grant for his documentary-film project, “A Library of Voices: A Living History of Modern Poetry.” The Poetry Room’s fellowship and grants program offers stipends to poets, artists, and scholars to undertake creative projects that would benefit from the resources available at the WPR archive, as well as from time spent at Harvard University as a whole. Past fellowship recipients have included Jared Stanley, Sameer Farooq, Sawako Nakayasu, Tracie Morris, Kate Colby, Dan Beachy-Quick, Erin Moure, Eileen Myles, and Fanny Howe. Past grant recipients have included: Harmony Holiday, Lindsay Turner, Tess Gallagher, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. About the Project: This project focuses on altar spaces as a speculative means to ‘alter’ the entangled past, present, and future. In this project, we endeavor to create radical altars as …
AFTER PEOPLE WHAT?: A Speculative Post
BOSTON RENAISSANCE: A Creative For(u)m
“Ones all speaking together….”—Alice Notley In an effort to foster community at a time of social-distancing, the Woodberry Poetry Room is launching an informal poetry exchange that will randomly pair poets from the Greater Boston area to create collaborative works. This is the first event in our “Boston Renaissance” series, which will also include a collaborative Zoom forum about the literary history—and future—of Boston and the crowd-sourced creation of a series of literary maps (or, so we hope)! How to Participate: Please send us an email at poetryrm@fas.harvard.edu, with your name and preferred contact information & “Boston Renaissance” in the subject header. Registration Deadline: June 1, 2020. How Do We Define “Boston-Area”: We don’t…. ! As you can tell from our Boston Originals series, we include poets from as far afield as Providence and Amherst under this moniker (as well as MFA and grad students who reside here for several years). Perhaps you might say: poets for whom the Boston area is either a dwelling-place or serves as a literary forum and cultural/educational nexus in …
WPR CREATIVE FELLOWSHIP & GRANTS: Announcing the 2020-2021 Recipients
The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipients of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship are Jared Stanley and Sameer Farooq for their collaborative project, “A Lip Smack, Laughter, Paper Rustles.” It also gives us great pleasure to announce that Harmony Holiday has been selected as the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Grant for her project, “Griot : Ghost” The Poetry Room’s fellowship and grants program offers stipends to poets,artists, and scholars to undertake creative projects that would benefit fromthe resources available at the WPR archive, as well as from time spent atHarvard University as a whole. Past fellowship recipients have included Sawako Nakayasu, Tracie Morris, Kate Colby, Dan Beachy-Quick, Erin Moure, Eileen Myles, and Fanny Howe. Poet Jared Stanley and interdisciplinary artist Sameer Farooq‘s project explores the incidental, non-poetic sounds an archive of literary readings collects—the rustling of paper, the clearing of a throat, authors’ ad-libbed banter, um‘s and pauses, intermittent laughter, and sounds and sirens from the outside world—all of which work in concert with the writer’s voice to create …
THE DOUBLE DREAM OF JOHN ASHBERY: On the Ashbery Papers and Reading Library
Just as the publication of John Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring (1970) helped to cement the poet’s post-Tennis Court Oath reputation, the double presence of Ashbery’s papers (at Houghton Library) and his personal reading library (at the Woodberry Poetry Room) promises to do the same for generations to come.
Announcing the 2018-2019 WPR Creative Fellowship & Grant Recipients
POETRY’S NOBLE PAUSE: On Patti Smith’s Nobel Prize Performance & Poetic Rupture
Poet and singer-songwriter Patti Smith’s recent magisterial performance at the Nobel Prize ceremony—in which she interrupts her own rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and takes a moment to apologize for her nerves—offers us a chance to reflect upon and celebrate poetry’s role in an increasingly mechanistic society.
AIR RAID: Archibald MacLeish and the Radio as Literary Device
On October 19th, 1938, a year and a half after the Columbia Workshop debut of his first (and what is largely considered the first) verse play for radio, The Fall of the City, Archibald MacLeish sat down at a microphone in Holden Chapel at Harvard University to record (and more importantly to inform the reading of) his most ambitious verse drama to date: Air Raid.