May 23 • Speaker Series • Bernard Quetchenbach – “The Ecological Vision of Theodore Roethke's ‘The Far Field’”
Date: Tuesday, May 23, 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:
The title poem of Theodore Roethke’s last and posthumously published book alternates between two settings: Michigan’s Saginaw Valley, site of the poet’s childhood, and the Pacific Northwest, the region where he lived during the last decade and a half of his life. In his ecocritical reading of “The Far Field,” one of the six long poems in Roethke’s “North American Sequence,” Quetchenbach demonstrates how Roethke “maintains the dignity of the commonplace by expanding the net of connections in all directions. . . .” The “journeying self in ‘The Far Field’ emerges into a vision of comprehensive ecological connectedness.” Quetchenbach will present his interpretation of this poem and then take questions and comments from the audience.
About Bernard Quetchenbach:
Bernard Quetchenbach is the author of Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (2000). His other publications include Accidental Gravity (2017), an essay collection, and The Hermit’s Place (2010), a volume of poems. He edited The Bunch Grass Motel (2017), a posthumous collected poems of Randall Gloege, who studied with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, and co-edited the forthcoming book The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. He is a professor of English at Montana State University Billings.
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