May 10, 2022 • SPEAKER SERIES • Katharine Bubel and Nicholas Bradley – “The Longing” & “Meditation at Oyster River”: Pacific Pastoral and the Desire for Home in Roethke’s “North American Sequence”
7:00 PM EST
This month's Speaker Series topic, “The Power of Language,” 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. Each week, William will introduce one or more contributors who will speak about the Roethke poems they address in their anthology contributions.
This week, scholars and friends 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. “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.
About the speakers:
Katharine Bubel is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity Western University. Her scholarship has addressed such themes as sacred nature and spiritual practice in the work of Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robinson Jeffers, Denise Levertov, Robert Hass, and other writers, especially of the West Coast. She is grateful to have lived with her family for thirty years in the tidal ambit of Boundary Bay on the Salish Sea just north of Roethke's epiphanic San Juan Islands.
Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of a book of poetry, Rain Shadow, as well as numerous studies of poetry and environmental writing in Canada and the United States. He lives in Victoria, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from the Washington coast traveled by Roethke and other poets of the Pacific Northwest.
William Barillas is an independent writer, editor, and former academic who has taught in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. He is the author of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland and the editor of A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, both from Ohio University Press, as well as many scholarly essays, poems, and works of creative nonfiction.
Thanks to generous support from the Ohio Arts Council, Arts Midwest, and the National Endowment for the Arts, our Speaker Series is free through May 31, 2022.
7:00 PM EST
This month's Speaker Series topic, “The Power of Language,” 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. Each week, William will introduce one or more contributors who will speak about the Roethke poems they address in their anthology contributions.
This week, scholars and friends 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. “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.
About the speakers:
Katharine Bubel is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity Western University. Her scholarship has addressed such themes as sacred nature and spiritual practice in the work of Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robinson Jeffers, Denise Levertov, Robert Hass, and other writers, especially of the West Coast. She is grateful to have lived with her family for thirty years in the tidal ambit of Boundary Bay on the Salish Sea just north of Roethke's epiphanic San Juan Islands.
Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of a book of poetry, Rain Shadow, as well as numerous studies of poetry and environmental writing in Canada and the United States. He lives in Victoria, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from the Washington coast traveled by Roethke and other poets of the Pacific Northwest.
William Barillas is an independent writer, editor, and former academic who has taught in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. He is the author of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland and the editor of A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, both from Ohio University Press, as well as many scholarly essays, poems, and works of creative nonfiction.
Thanks to generous support from the Ohio Arts Council, Arts Midwest, and the National Endowment for the Arts, our Speaker Series is free through May 31, 2022.
7:00 PM EST
This month's Speaker Series topic, “The Power of Language,” 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. Each week, William will introduce one or more contributors who will speak about the Roethke poems they address in their anthology contributions.
This week, scholars and friends 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. “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.
About the speakers:
Katharine Bubel is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity Western University. Her scholarship has addressed such themes as sacred nature and spiritual practice in the work of Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robinson Jeffers, Denise Levertov, Robert Hass, and other writers, especially of the West Coast. She is grateful to have lived with her family for thirty years in the tidal ambit of Boundary Bay on the Salish Sea just north of Roethke's epiphanic San Juan Islands.
Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of a book of poetry, Rain Shadow, as well as numerous studies of poetry and environmental writing in Canada and the United States. He lives in Victoria, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from the Washington coast traveled by Roethke and other poets of the Pacific Northwest.
William Barillas is an independent writer, editor, and former academic who has taught in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. He is the author of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland and the editor of A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, both from Ohio University Press, as well as many scholarly essays, poems, and works of creative nonfiction.
Thanks to generous support from the Ohio Arts Council, Arts Midwest, and the National Endowment for the Arts, our Speaker Series is free through May 31, 2022.