Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

“Remember When We Talked About the Future? Memory and Aspiration in Poems” with Gabrielle Calvocoressi

What is a poem of joy? Or a line of poetry that evokes joy? In this talk, we’ll think through what joy means, what a poem of joy might look like, and how a poem of joy might affect its readers. In the process, we’ll look at poems by various poets such as Frank O’Hara, Robert Hass, Li-Young Lee, Ross Gay, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others.

This lecture will explore the idea that poetry should “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” How does something recognizable or mundane suddenly find itself charged with mystery? How does something wild and surreal feel immediately connected to our daily lives? At a glance, it might seem like I’m describing two very different types of poems: one invested in our ordinary world, the other reaching for the absurd. The real and the unreal. However, in each of these modes, the effect I’m describing is actually achieved through similar means.

The ways in which writers engage the I has always been worthy of discussion. But mostly not for what the I says about the writer - and yet, what we imagine the I says about the writer is what frightens so many of becoming multitudes. This class asks questions about the I and what it means to embody multitudes, what it means to be more than ourselves on the page.

Dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels like Parable of the Sower, Station Eleven, Severance, Fiskadoro, and Dhalgren often imagine relationships of love, companionship, and interdependence across lines of race, gender identification, class, age, and nationality. This lecture raises the question of why these stories seem so attractive in the future, yet impossible in the present, and what we can learn from dystopian narratives about creating better characters in any story.

Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences Director, Jennifer Grotz, welcomes you to the August Lecture Series.

Jody Gladding takes a look at this 4th century Chinese poem embroidered by its author into a grid of 840 characters, which has engendered endless readings, legends, and artistic explorations, raising fascinating questions about what it means to “translate.”

Closed captioning is available for live events.

Financial aid is available for the Lecture Series; contact us for more information at blwc@middlebury.edu.

Pam Houston and J. Drew Lanham will read from their work.