The biennial Princeton Poetry Festival returns to McCarter Theatre on Friday, November 17, from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Organized by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Princeton University professor Paul Muldoon, the free event features a full day of readings, panel discussions, and a lecture featuring poets from around the world:
The following overview of the guest poets and their past statements regarding poetry and life provides a “sneak preview” of one of the area’s most important literary happenings:
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the Beijing-born American author of 14 volumes of poetry, including “Empathy,” “I Love Artists,” and the forthcoming “Plant Thought,” created in collaboration with artists Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle.
Talking about her art in the Yale Review, the poet says, “I suppose there’s a private music to each person’s writing, and mine involves an extended line. I have a naturally expansive way of thinking, and that fits with the wide horizons of northern New Mexico, where I live. One possibility is that I extend as long as I can, before a sentence breaks of its own weight, and I start again. Or, since I appropriate found language, the line may break where a new fragment of language is being attached. I try to keep the form as open as I can to express listening … I’m trying to unify the abstract in a continuous reality with beloved beings and their experiences, using the poem as a canvas.”
Joyelle McSweeney is the American author of 10 books of poetry, drama, and prose. Part of the faculty of Notre Dame, the Guggenheim Fellow says in an interview for Eco Theo, “My aesthetic sense was born in my Catholicism, and to be Catholic is to have one’s eyes full of gold — in big places but also small — on prayer cards on your aunt’s bedside table, the flaking Roman numerals under the stations of the cross. In the Catholic visual imagination, Gold is, like God, a holy paradox, at once untouchable and immanent, absent and omnipresent. Gold is sublime because it’s able to embody opposites — it’s the sun and also just a dot in a disk in an alchemist’s notebook.
“As I grew I began to understand the history of the Catholic church and its role in conquest of the Americas … For me this sinful element of Gold actually magnified its role in my thinking — again, as a Catholic, the deepest sins and the highest ecstasies wear the same gold glove … I think it’s my double sense of Gold, and my sense of its imbrication with God, and with humans as poor copies of God, with all God’s good and bad instincts — which lead me to see Gold everywhere, and to lace it all through my books.”
Valzhyna Mort writes in English and in her native Belarusian. The Cornell University faculty member and award-winning author of the books “Factory of Tears” and “Collected Body” shared the following in an interview with Libhub: “I don’t approach a poem. A poem approaches me. How does a poem approach me writing it? I think that poetic craft is a matter of patient listening. I listen until there’s no story, no information, only music …
“The fact that I’m a failed opera singer might be the most important piece of information for my readers … I think of rhythm and melody as architecture made of sound. Music opened for me another dimension to enter and be in. It’s shaped the way a large garden is shaped: full of turns, full of thought-through combinations of color that pop up in different seasons, where open views and tall trees alternate, where on a narrow path walled by silver-firs one suddenly walks into an open space with a fountain in the middle. From music and from walking in the city and in the countryside, I’ve learned how connections between diverse elements intensify into a form. Poetic tension is about when to turn the corner, when to switch on the fountain.”
John Okrent is an American poet and doctor who works at a community health center in Tacoma, Washington. His poems — many about living and dying during COVID — have appeared in several literary magazines. His first book, “The Costly Season,” appeared in 2022.
In a variety of comments in various publications, Okrent says, “I’m drawn to the poetic form because I feel it comes closest to lived experience — a poem, as opposed to describing experience, comes closest to being experience. . .
“The poems are constructed from the notes of my days, and so they arise naturally out of the stuff of my days … poetry is the art of attention. And I was looking for a way to pay attention to this time in a way that didn’t just feel completely devastating.”
Roger Reeves is the New Jersey-raised author of the “Best Barbarian,” a 2022 finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to having appeared in a variety of noted poetry journals, he is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University.
In the online journal AGNI, he says, “I grew up in a Pentecostal church, and that makes me very aware of nouns and the performance of language, the performative utterance. What is it to say, And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light, or, ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’? All those pronouncements make a thing so, they make a thing visible. In light of this tradition, I’m interested in how names also make something visible.
“But I also think we forget that poetry has a really long history of naming. If we think about ‘The Aeneid’ or ‘The Iliad,’ they give the names of all the soldiers that are dying and how they die. So if I think about ‘Domestic Violence,’ the poem where I do a lot of naming, it’s because I want to participate in that epic tradition. When I think of those who have died at the hands of police brutality and anti-Blackness, we think of them as expendable, much in the way soldiers are thought of as expendable.”
Padraig Regan is the Irish recipient of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and Ireland Chair of the Poetry Bursary Prize. The Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge says in a statement for Forward Arts Foundation, “There are certain themes that I seem unable to leave alone: food and appetite, the (queer) penetrability of the body, art, and artifice — these have been the ‘material’ of my poems since I started writing. What has changed over time has been my relationship to the lyric mode … I became more and more suspicious of the limitations of the lyric poem and aware of its sometimes troubling inheritances, which lead to a period of a couple of years when the lyric structures I had been using more-or-less unconsciously seemed inadequate. But … this tension with the medium became generative and I found myself writing poems that were more formally and thematically lyrical than anything I had written before. Another big shift has been my approach to the line, which has shortened over time … I love poems that resemble the structures of thinking, or that feel like the remains of a mind having worked.”
Philip Schultz is the American author of several collections of poetry, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prizing-winning “Failure.” Based in New York City, Schultz has seen work published in numerous poetry journals and magazines and received fellowship awards from the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.
As he says in a Literary Matters interview, “Emotional truth is one of the hardest things to achieve in writing, but once attained it allows us to discover, say, our real feelings toward someone about whom we’re writing an elegy, regardless of how uncomfortable that might make us. One example is an elegy that I wrote for a close friend. I struggled with it for many years, not realizing how angry I was that he died before the book on which he helped me was published and won acclaim. How could I possibly be angry at a dear friend for dying of cancer two days before his fiftieth birthday? My shame was too great to allow me to realize how complicated my emotions were, and I suppressed the truth of what I was really feeling. When I finally recognized my anger, the poem came quickly …
“There are always at least one hundred or more reasons not to write something that deals with difficult material, and only one or two genuine reasons to go forth. We all know that we tell ourselves lies to get through the day, to avoid confronting convoluted and fearful emotions …To some degree, all artists vacillate between self-loathing and self-love. I certainly wrestle with the tension between both extremes every time I sit down to write. Do I have anything of value to tell others, or am I wasting my time and theirs?
Luci Tapahonso, the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation, is the author of three children’s books and six award-winning books of poetry. She is the recipient of the 2022 Distinguished Literary Achievement Award by the Western Literature Association, 2022 Indigenous Knowledge Holder Semi-Finalist from the Luce Foundation, and the 2021 Ostana (Italy) International Prize, which honors authors who write in their mother tongue.
In an interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books, she says, a “breakthrough came when I began learning poetics and the history of poetry in terms of Western forms of poetry, and those were really complex and difficult to learn. I made the connection when I was at a Blessing Way ceremony, and the medicine man and other people were singing. The medicine man was praying. The prayer he was saying I had heard many times, but each time it is really beautiful because it evokes all these images. He said it as it was said in the beginning, and it has never changed. If it changes, the ceremony is upset. He has to keep all of it exactly the way he learned it in all his years of apprenticeship. It struck me that if I visualized what he was saying it indeed had form. There was repetition. I realized that what I already had inside me was older than all the ceremony books. From then on, I was really eager, and I didn’t dismiss all of these classic Western poets because I felt like, ‘I already know this. I just know it in me, I don’t even have to have books.’ That was the breakthrough for me.”
Princeton Poetry Festival, McCarter Theater, 91 University Place, Princeton. Friday, November 17, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Free. www.princeton.edu/events/2023/2023-princeton-poetry-festival.
