Poet, literary critic Kirsch to give Flora Plonsky Levy Lecture

Published

Poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch will discuss “Poetry and the Problem of Politics” during the 2018 Flora Plonsky Levy Lecture.

Kirsch will speak at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18, in the Oliver Hall Auditorium on campus.

His presentation will examine how and why politics fuels the creativity of many writers.

Kirsch will consider the work of several influential poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley's “England in 1819,” Ezra Pound's “Canto 45,” William Butler Yeats's “Ancestral Houses,” and W.H. Auden's “September 1, 1939.”

Kirsch is the author of 10 books of poetry and prose, including “Emblems of the Passing World; Poems after Photographs by August Sander” and “The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry.”

He is an editor for the Weekend Review section of the Wall Street Journal. Kirsch was a writer and editor for The New Republic.

His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Poetry.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. Kirsch has taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.

The annual Flora Levy Lecture Series is hosted by the UL Lafayette English Department through a UL Lafayette Foundation endowment. The free lecture is open to the public.

For more information, contact Jack Ferstel, master instructor in the Department of English, at jwf3885@louisiana.edu or (337) 207-8490.