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Robert Pinsky presents THE MIND HAS CLIFFS OF FALL with Gail Mazur and Jill McDonough at Porter Square Books

October 29, 2019 | 7:00 pm

Free

oin award-winning poet Robert Pinsky, Gail Mazur, and Jill McDonough for a reading from Pinskys’ new poetry anthology The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall.

Despair, mania, rage, guilt, derangement, fantasy: poetry is our most intimate, personal source for the urgency of these experiences. Poems get under our skin; they engage with the balm, and the sting, of understanding. In The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall–its title inspired by a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem–acclaimed poet Robert Pinsky gives us more than 130 poems that explore emotion at its most expansive, distinct, and profound.

With seven illuminating chapters and succinct headnotesfor each poem, Pinsky leads us through the book’s sweeping historical range. Each chapter, with contents chronologically presented from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Dante to Patricia Lockwood, shows the persistence and variation in our states of mind. “The Sleep of Reason” explores sanity and the imagination, moving from William Cowper’s “Lines Written During a Time of Insanity” to Nicole Sealey’s “a violence.” “Grief” includes Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” and “Manic Laughter” highlights both Lewis Carroll and Mart n Espada. Each poem reveals something new about the vastness of human emotion; taken together they offer a sweeping ode to the power of poetry.

Guided by “our finest living example of the American civic poet]” (New York Times), The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall demonstrates how extreme feelings can be complementary and contradicting, and how poetry is not just an expression of emotion, but emotion itself.

Robert Pinsky is the author of ten collections of poetry including, most recently, At the Foundling Hospital. His translation The Inferno of Dante won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. His brief guide The Sounds of Poetry is used in acting classes. As a three-term United States Poet Laureate, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans shared their favorite poems. That project gave rise to three previous anthologies, Americans’ Favorite PoemsAn Invitation to Poetry, and Singing School. Pinsky lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Boston University.

Gail Mazur is author of 8 collections of poetry, including Forbidden City (2016), Figures in a Landscape, iZeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems, (winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award and a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and They Can’t Take That Away from Me which was a finalist for the National Book Award.  Her new collection, Land’s End: New & Selected Poems, will be published by University of Chicago Press in fall 2020. She is founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series and Visiting Professor in Boston University’s MFA Program. She lives in Cambridge and Provincetown.

Details

Date:
October 29, 2019
Time:
7:00 pm
Cost:
Free
Event Categories:
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Website:
https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/robert-pinsky-gail-mazur-and-jill-mcdonough-mind-has-cliffs-fall

Venue

Porter Square Books
25 White Street
Cambridge, MA 02140 United States
+ Google Map
Phone:
617-491-2220
Website:
http://www.portersquarebooks.com

Did You Know?

Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.