Author of "Can Poetry Save the Earth" to appear at the Lenox Library
LENOX, Mass. - On Sunday, October 18th from 4:00 to 6:00 pm the Lenox Library will present the second program in its 2009 -2010 Distinguished Lecture Series featuring Professor John Felstiner of Stanford University and author of the recent book, “Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poems”.In his book Professor Felstiner presents those poets who he feels have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world ranging from Blake and Whitman to Walcott and Gary Snyder. In his lecture and readings, he will make the case that as we hover on the environmental point of no return, poetry may have the singular capacity to return our attention to our environment before it is too late.
John Felstiner started teaching at Stanford in 1965. He has also has taught at the University of Chile, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Yale University. Teaching North American poetry in Chile in 1967-68 led to Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), which won the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. This experience initiated Felstiner’s ongoing concern with the practice of literary translation.
During the 1970s Prof. Felstiner developed critical approaches to poetry by civilians and soldiers from the Vietnam era, and after teaching at the Hebrew University in Israel (1974-75), he began studying the literature, art, photography, and music that emerged from the European Jewish catastrophe. His book on the German-speaking Jewish poet, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize, and won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 1997. His Norton anthology of Celan’s work won MLA, ATA, and PEN prizes. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Prof. Felstiner will be available after his discussion to sign copies of “Can Poetry Save the Earth” which will be for sale at this event courtesy of The Bookstore in Lenox.
Each of the series’ monthly lectures, organized and hosted by Professor Jeremy Yudkin, is scheduled on a Sunday at 4:00pm in the Sedgwick Reading Room of the Lenox Library at 18 Main Street, Lenox, MA. All lectures are free and open to the public; no reservations are required. For information about future lectures in this series, please visit the Library’s “Calendar of Events” at www.lenoxlib.org.
