University of Illinois Event with WS Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and Richard Powers

Merwin, Pinsky & Powers: CultureTalk.

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This free event will be held on Tuesday, October 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Illinois, Urbana campus. Sounds great!

From the University of Illinois calendar website:

This event brings influential cultural figures to campus to discuss the evolving relationships between the arts and contemporary society.

Dante's masterpiece The Divine Comedy provides the basis for a conversation that coincides with the major academic conference "Translating the Middle Ages," sponsored by the UIUC Program in Medieval Studies and the Center for Translation Studies.

W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and essayist, has published over a dozen books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders and The River Sound, that have evolved from a medieval formality (echoed in his translation of Dante's Purgatorio) into a more distinctly American voice.

Translator, essayist, teacher, jazz musician, and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, an online video database of ordinary people reading their most-cherished poems, and created the anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, now in its 18th printing. He earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry and the Howard Morton Landon Translation Award for his translation of Dante's The Inferno.

Richard Powers, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Time Magazine Book of the Year honoree, UIUC Swanlund Chair in English, and author of the landmark novel The Gold Bug Variations, will moderate this expedition into the center of Dante's epic poem and its impact on literature, poetic structure, and the depiction of spirituality.