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David Hinton: "The Wilds of Poetry"

David Hinton reads from and talks about his newest book, The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape, which reenvisions modern American poetry as an extension of the ancient Chinese tradition of ecopoetry. Q&A and book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.

About the Book:

Henry David Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, describes a moment on Mount Ktaadin when all explanations and assumptions fell away for him and he was confronted with the wonderful, inexplicable thusness of things. David Hinton takes that moment as the starting point for his account of a re-wilding of consciousness in the West:  a dawning awareness of our essential oneness with the world around us. Because there was no Western vocabulary for this perception, it fell to poets to make the first efforts at articulation, and those efforts were largely driven by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist ideas imported from ancient China. Hinton chronicles this re-wilding through the lineage of avant-garde poetry in twentieth-century America—from Ezra Pound and Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, and beyond—including generous selections of poems that together form a compelling anthology of ecopoetry. In his much-admired translations, Hinton has reenvisioned ancient Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry as modern American poetry; here, he reenvisions modern American poetry as an extension of that ancient Chinese tradition: an ecopoetry that weaves consciousness into the Cosmos in radical and fundamental ways.

About the Author:

David Hinton’s many translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim and many national awards, including a lifetime achievement award by The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His recent books of essays are: Hunger Mountain and Existence: A Story. He lives in East Calais and teaches in Columbia University’s graduate writing program.

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Date: 09/19/2017
Time: 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Place:

77 Main St
Montpelier, VT 05602
United States