Poetry Symposium
"We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark."
-Wallace Stevens, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
"That Highest Candle": Poetry and Spirituality
Celebrating the Opening of the Humanities Reading Room
October 18-19, 2022
Featuring
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Gray is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include Salient (New Directions, 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions, 2022) and Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Divan-i Hafiz (White Cloud Press, 2018). Sections of the Tibeto-Mongolian folk epic “The Life of King Kesar of Ling,” co-translated with Siddiq Wahid, appear in Columbia University Press’s Sources of Tibetan Tradition (2013).
Michael Heller
Heller has published over twenty-five volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction. Recent books include Constellations of Waking, an opera libretto on Walter Benjamin (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Telescope: Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2019), and Within the Inscribed: Selected Prose and Conversations (Shearsman Books, 2021). A collection of essays on his work, The Poetry of Michael Heller: Nomad Memory, appeared in 2015.
Peter O’Leary
O’Leary is the author of several books of poetry, most recently, The Hidden Eyes of Things (Cultural Society, 2022), a book-length poem exploring the unconscious through the discipline of astrology, as well as three collections of prose, including The Four Horsemen: Poetry and Apocalypse, which is forthcoming. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois and teaches courses in religion and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With John Tipton, he edits Verge Books.
Donald Revell
Revell is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently of White Campion (2021) and of The English Boat (2018), both from Alice James Books. He has also published six volumes of translation from the French, including books by Apollinaire, Laforgue, Verlaine, and Rimbaud.
Henry Weinfield
Weinfield’s most recent books are two collections of poems, An Alphabet (2022) and As the Crow Flies (2021), both published by Dos Madres Press, and a verse-translation, The Labyrinth of Love: Selected Sonnets and Other Poems by the sixteenth-century French poet, Pierre de Ronsard (Parlor Press, 2021). He is currently writing essays on Dante that he hopes will eventually turn into a book. He taught for many years in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and, having retired in 2019, now lives in New York City.Events
Tuesday, October 18, 7:00pm
- A Round Table Discussion with the Poets on Spiritual and Poetic Texts
- Public Reception Following
- Texts for Round Table Discussion
Wednesday, October 19, 4:00pm
- Poetry Reading by Tirzah Goldenberg, Peter O'Leary, and Donald Revell
Wednesday, October 19, 7:30pm
- Poetry Reading by Elizabeth Gray, Michael Heller, and Henry Weinfield
All events will take place on the first floor of McDonald Library, Xavier University. Parking is free and available in any parking lot on campus for both nights.
Humanities Reading Room
The Humanities Reading Room, Second Floor, McDonald Library, will be open during the symposium.
Contact
For more information, contact Alison Morgan, Assistant Director of Public Services, University Library, or Dr. Norman Finkelstein, Professor Emeritus, Department of English.