COLE SWENSEN AT TEMPLE

Lecture
“Busy Poetry: Recent Documentary and Research-based Poetics.”
Who is poetry speaking to, and who is poetry speaking for?---two questions that condition poetry's relationship to the world at large. Recent work in both documentary and research-based poetries have complicated and enriched that relationship in ways that make us reconsider the boundaries of poetry itself.
Wednesday, April 8, 3:00, Weigley Room, 9th floor Gladfelter Hall on Main campus.

Reading
Thursday April 9 at 8:00 p.m. at Temple's Center City campus (1515 Market St., room 222).

Cole Swensen’s most recent book is Ours (University of California, 2008). She is the co-editor with David St. John of the anthology American Hybrid (W. W. Norton, 2009). She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

REVIEW OF COLE SWENSEN'S OURS

Here's a link to an insightful review of Cole Swensen's Ours by Donna Stonecipher:

http://jacketmagazine.com/36/r-swensen-rb-stonecipher.shtml

The review is a fine example of close reading (attentiveness to the poetry as language) and drawing out many ideas that are central to the poems (the double space of the garden as nature/culture, private/public, "ours"/"not ours," cyclical/linear, and so on). We'll explore many of these ideas in our discussions of the book.