In April 1996, the Academy of American Poets started National Poetry Month with the goal of bringing poetry into the daily lives of Americans. As part of this year’s national poetry celebration, Lehigh Libraries has a host of events and activities scheduled throughout the month of April, including poetry readings, open mic night, talks, and a bilingual poetry workshop!
Robb Fillman poetry reading / Open Mic
April 1 | 8 PM | Lucy’s Café, Linderman Library ground floor | Sponsored by the Lehigh Libraries and Lehigh After Dark
Please join Lehigh Libraries and Lehigh After Dark for an Open Mic Night/Poetry Reading. Lehigh alumnus Robb Fillman will read from his latest book, House Bird, and will moderate the open mic portion of the event.
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His poems have recently appeared in Poetry East, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review and elsewhere. Fillman earned a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh, and he currently teaches at Kutztown University.
Julie Phillips Brown / Reading from The Adjacent Possible: Poems of Emergence and Relation
April 27 | 4:30 PM | via Zoom
The Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries invite you to join an afternoon of poetry with Julie Phillips Brown on Wednesday, April 27, 2022 from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m, via Zoom.
In The Adjacent Possible: Poems of Emergence and Relation, Julie Phillips Brown, an interdisciplinary poet, visual artist, literary critic, and editor will read from her latest book, The Adjacent Possible, and also answer your questions.
About the speaker:
Julie Phillips Brown is an interdisciplinary poet, visual artist, literary critic, and editor. She is the author of The Adjacent Possible (Green Writers Press, 2021), winner of the Hopper Poetry Prize, and a recipient of the Freund Prize from Cornell University. Her writing appears in Borderlands, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, interim, Plume, The Rumpus, Twyckenham Notes, Vassar Review, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She lives in Lexington, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and studio art. Find her at tactualpoiesis.com
The talk will be followed by a Q&A session led by Boaz Nadav Manes, Lehigh’s University Librarian. This event is free and open to the public.
Please register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Sponsored by The Friends of the Lehigh University Libraries.
Understanding Viral Media Through Chinese Poetry
April 28 | 4:30 PM | Nick Admussen, Associate Professor, Asian Studies, Cornell University | The Scheler Family Humanities Forum (Linderman 200), Linderman Library | Sponsored by Lehigh Libraries, Asian Studies
The last 20 years of Chinese contemporary poetry have been overwhelmingly digital. Poets post pre-print poems online, reproduce the poems of others, and angrily dispute the nature of poetry in conflagrations whose nature is recognizable to anyone who has ever read an online comments section. What has happened to Chinese poetry during its digital transition reveals some of the elemental forces that generate, shape, and circulate viral texts and images. This talk will look at the afterlife of a famous poem by Gu Cheng to discuss what is deleted or lost when a poem becomes a viral text; then it will discuss the furor around a poem by Zhao Lihua to talk about viral reproduction as an irony-free practice that is always participatory and transformative. It will then use these concepts to reread Anglophone viral media, including the Star Wars Kid viral video and the Twitter bio phrase "RT is not endorsement."
Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Cornell University. His publications include the monograph Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry, the poetry collection Stand Back, Don't Fear the Change and the translation of poet Ya Shi's collection Floral Mutter. He is currently the faculty board chair of the Cornell East Asia Series; his next book project is on literary stricture.
Poem In Your Pocket Day
April 29 | All day
A yearly tradition of the Academy of American Poets, Poem in Your Pocket Day is a day when poetry is exchanged widely and joyfully. It will be held on April 29 this year. Follow @lehighlibraries on Instagram for poems throughout the day. Post your own favorite poems and tag us! The event uses #pocketpoem across all social media platforms. No registration required to participate - just a love of poetry!
Writing Two-Tongued Poetry workshop
April 29 | 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM | Nick Admussen, Associate Professor, Asian Studies, Cornell University | Fairchild Martindale Library, room 520
All poems involve mixing different types of language. We might be mixing the way we speak English with the way we’d like to speak English, or we might be mixing the language we encounter in books with the languages of our friends and families. In this workshop, we’ll read and discuss poems whose language mixing is formal, intentional, and interlingual — between Spanish, English and Chinese — as a provocation to experiment with our own two-tongued poems. Registration required.
Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese Literature and Culture at Cornell University. His publications include the monograph Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry, the poetry collection Stand Back, Don't Fear the Change and the translation of poet Ya Shi's collection Floral Mutter. He is currently the faculty board chair of the Cornell East Asia Series; his next book project is on literary stricture.
OverDrive Poetry Collection
Discover and read a diverse selection of poets in this year's Poetry Month OverDrive Collection, which includes titles from Danez Smith, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, and rupi kaur, among many others. If you're new to OverDrive, please see directions for setting up an account here.