May 9 • Speaker Series • Aaron Moe – “Animality in the Poetry of Whitman and Roethke”
Date: Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Time: 7:00 p.m. EST
Location: Virtual (Zoom)
Cost: A donation is required to attend this event. Please select either $10, $5, or $1 donation based on your financial capabilities. If a donation is a hardship right now, please reach out to us at info@friendsofroethke.org.
About the event:
While imagery of plants, both domestic and wild, is central to Theodore Roethke’s poetry, he also wrote memorably about wild animals. Scholar Aaron Moe contributed an essay on one of Roethke’s animal poems, “The Pike,” to A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (2021), edited by William Barillas and published by Ohio University Press. Employing zoopoetics, which he defines as the study of “animal presences in the gestures of a poem,” Moe suggests how “the form of this poem emerges from an attentive engagement with another species.” In his talk, Moe will touch on this and Roethke’s other animal poems and relate them to the animal presences in the poetry of Walt Whitman, one of Roethke’s key influences. Moe will present his interpretation of this poem and then take questions and comments from the audience.
About Aaron Moe:
Aaron M. Moe is the author of the book of poems, exhalations (2021), and two scholarly books—Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus (2019) and Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry (2014)—along with several chapters and articles on ecopoetics / zoopoetics. In 2015, he published a leaflet of aphorisms, Protean Poetics. His creative work can also be found at Twenty Bellows, in Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back, and is forthcoming in the projects Traces: Symphyses of Snow and Sand and The Despairimentalist Manifesto. He and his family live near the foothills of the Colorado Rockies where they hike, climb, run trails, and write.
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