John Ashbery Poetry Series Presents
Tea & a Reading with Eleni Sikélianòs
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Shafer House and Bard Hall
3:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
3:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The two-time winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing meets with students and faculty and reads her poems
***Please note the corrected location information below. The late afternoon tea for Bard students, staff, and faculty takes place in Shafer House. Only the 6:00 p.m. public reading will be in Bard Hall.***On Thursday, March 9th, the John Ashbery Poetry Series presents tea and a reading with Eleni Sikélianòs.
From 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Bard students and staff are warmly invited to stop by Shafer House (the Written Arts office building at the Annandale Triangle) to take tea and light refreshments with Sikélianòs.
At 6:00 p.m., Sikélianòs reads from her work in Bard Hall. Introduced by Ann Lauterbach and followed by a conversation and Q&A, the reading is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.
Sikélianòs is the author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead, Body Clock, The Book of Jon, The California Poem, The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls, Earliest Worlds, The Book of Tendons, and To Speak While Dreaming.
“In Make Yourself Happy, Eleni Sikélianòs evinces a neuro-psychological state counter to the miswrought biology that has haunted the Occident since the dawn of Roman times. These poems open the neurology to its whole participation in the psycho-physical field and are not unlike the seminal amplification of indigenous culture, where the language of the body simultaneously circulates with living metastates. These poems organically form as environmental respiration that only the poet can approach in the latter days of this techno-hypercritical epoch.”—Will Alexander
“Electric as a lightning storm, wild as a first-growth forest, protean as fantasy’s shape-shifters—that’s Sikélianòs’s poetry.” —Library Journal
“Eleni’s language—body-language, breath, and babies’ many minds behind—a poem that won’t let you go til it’s done with you, its sinuous whipping lines.” —Gary Snyder
“The Book of Jon is a wonderful memoir, held together by string, rumor, glimpses of a father—and there is nothing like this father in literature—evoked toughly and with great love and above all art and craft. Both subject and author are unforgettable. We see a life approached informally from all sides and we read an obituary to die for.” —Michael Ondaatje
For more information, call 845-758-7054, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 3:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Shafer House and Bard Hall