FOTR Weekly: Continuing to Explore the Power of Language with Katharine Bubel, Nicholas Bradley, and More
“To this extent I’m a stalk.
—How free; how all alone.Out of these nothings
—All beginnings come.”– Theodore Roethke, “The Longing”
May brings our final segment of the Saginaw Chapbook Project Virtual Speaker Series: The Power of Language. This segment features contributors to the critical anthology A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, edited by William Barillas and published by Ohio University Press in 2021. This week, Katharine Bubel & Nicholas Bradley will discuss Roethke’s “The Longing” and “Meditation at Oyster River” tomorrow, May 10, at 7pm on Zoom. Check out a reading of “Meditation at Oyster River” on YouTube, take a look at a musical adaptation of the poem by composer Glenn Stallcop, and read on to find out more about our upcoming events!
Upcoming this Week
Speaker Series on May 10:“The Longing” and “Meditation at Oyster River”: Pacific Pastoral and the Desire for Home in Roethke’s “North American Sequence”
with Katharine Bubel & Nicholas Bradley
Tomorrow at 7pm via Zoom, Katharine Bubel and Nicholas Bradley will engage in a conversation about the first two of the six long poems in Roethke’s late “North American Sequence.” They will consider how “The Longing” expresses the poet-speaker’s desire to be at home in his Pacific Northwest place, while “Meditation at Oyster River” expresses Roethke’s pastoral vision of the Pacific Northwest, where, in his reckoning, a restless spirit could be calmed and sustained.
Looking Ahead
Speaker Series on May 17:Excavating Roethke’s “Root Cellar”
with John Rohrkemper
On May 17 at 7pm via Zoom, John Rohrkemper will talk with us about his essay, “Excavating Roethke’s ‘Root Cellar.’” He identifies the root cellar in Roethke’s poem as an unromantic place of small, unlovely things. While all of the greenhouse poems are about becoming, in all its uncertainty and glory, “Root Cellar” describes the first inchoate stirrings of life in the greenhouse world.
Saginaw Chapbook Project Book Launch on May 21
at the Roethke House
Join us on Saturday, May 21 from 2:00 to 4:00pm for an afternoon celebrating the publication of the Saginaw Chapbook Project anthology. You’re all invited to enjoy light refreshments, check out the beautiful handmade copies of the chapbook produced with support from the KBAC, and celebrate the work of our contributors as they share some of the work they’ve published through this project. We hope to see you there in person for the first time this season!
The event will take place in the backyard of the Roethke House. Should we need to move inside due to weather, we will follow CDC guidelines posted here.
Special Thanks & Additional Info
Thank you to Edward Hirsch for reading your spectacular essay about Roethke’s “Cuttings” and “Cuttings (later),” and thank you to both Edward Hirsch and William Barillas for such a lively, impassioned discussion of American poetry. We are grateful for the time and insights you shared with us, and especially for your generous Q&A segment. To those who joined us for this event, we hope it helped to bring Roethke’s words alive for you, and similarly to broaden your understanding of the way that Roethke is woven into the fabric of American poetry. As US poet laureate Charles Simic wrote praising Hirsch’s work in How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch convinces both poetry-lovers and poetry-skeptics to deepen their appreciation for the form, demonstrating “to one and all that the reading of poems is one of the supreme pleasures in life.” We certainly found this to be true during his talk last week.
To learn more about Edward Hirsch and see where you can purchase his books, visit his website. See Poetry Daily to read a sample of his work, and check out Penguin Random House to read an excerpt from Stranger by Night.
See Katharine Bubel’s page here to read more about her awards and publications.
For more on Nicholas Bradley see his page here. To read more about and purchase his poetry collection, visit the University of Alberta Press page for Rain Shadow.
Thanks to generous support from Michigan Arts and Culture Council, Arts Midwest, Ohio Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts, our events are free and open to the public through May 31, 2022.
Kellie Rankey holds a BA in Creative Writing from SVSU, where they currently remain a student. Their work has appeared inThe Normal School,Tiny Molecules, and theMichigan Sociological Review, and is forthcoming from Wrongdoing Magazine.