Quantá Holden | Duke English | Digital Communication Specialist
This semester, Duke English hosted "Spring into Poetry," a series of poetry-themed events open to the Duke community and fellow poetry lovers. The series consisted of workshops, readings, and performances adapted from poetry. These events featured Duke English faculty, students, and invited poets, scholars of the genre, and performers.
A workshop featuring Yerra Sugarman, co-sponsored by Duke Arts and Duke English, kicked off the "Spring into Poetry" series. Yerra Sugarman is an award-winning American Poet, essayist, and teacher. Over a dozen members of the Duke University community joined Sugarman for a workshop tailored to look at poetry through the frame of the poetic voice. She stated that this element attracts the audience and builds the relationship between them and the poets. Attendees joined Sugarman in discussing five poems they received prior to the workshop. They also workshopped some of their own writing and took a deep dive into elements of the poems presented:
Throughout the workshop, Sugarman reiterated that writers can only improve their writing by continuously writing, and when it comes to poetry, the "voice" within is a critical element of making it all work.
This workshop was the first installment in the Duke Art Create workshops for the semester. Duke Arts Create is a free, hands-on arts workshop series offered to members of the Duke community.
Visiting Blackburn Distinguished Artist in Residence Toby Martinez de las Rivasheadlined the Blackburn Poetry Event that launched the 2024 Poetry in Theology Symposium. Contemporary poets Lisa Russ Spaar and Dante Micheaux joined Martinez de las Rivas as the featured guests. The featured poets described their works prior to their readings and spoke of the connections between poetry and theology. Some of their pieces were born out of theology in some way. Several of the selections shared had nature and sound embodied elements.
I couldn't have been more pleased with the Blackburn Poetry Reading and Q&A. When you host a poetry reading at 4 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, you wonder if anyone will show up – but they did! Our three brilliant poets – Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Dante Micheaux, & Lisa Russ Spaar – read to a packed room. Though unified by a shared concern with theological questions, each poet brought a very different style – of both poetry & reading – to the podium. I think this made for a particularly enjoyable couple of hours. After the reading, the poets spoke beautifully about their relation to faith & poetry and their relationship. In the following days, the symposium participants considered similar questions via a series of vibrant group discussions about poets such as Rilke, Eliot, & Claudel, to name just a few. We are grateful both to Duke English & to the Blackburn Endowment for supporting this critical Symposium on poetry & theology.
– Will Brewbaker, IV, Duke English PhD candidate, Event Moderator
Professor Thomas Pfau organized the "Poetry & Theology: 1800-Present—A Symposium," which brought a dozen scholars and poets from around the world together to present and discuss the relationship between poetry and theology.
"Songs in Flight," featuring Professor Tsitsi Jaji, the text curator, and contributing poet, was performed at the Hayti Heritage Cultural Center. "Songs in Flight," composed by Shawn Okpebholo, is an artistic response to the "Freedom on the Move" database launched by Cornell University in 2019 that consists of more than 30,000 newspaper advertisements targeting the return of runaway enslaved Africans. The project includes a collection of poetry curated by Prof. Jaji, written by her, Crystal Simone Smith, and Tyehimba Jess, and composed by Okpebholo that aims to care for the dead and their memory and seeks to cultivate freedom.
"Songs in Flight" brings visual, sound, and text together to create a wonderful song art project that tells the story of these challenging times. This performance was the first time Jeremy Botts' visual presentation was added as a backdrop to the works of Tsitsi Jaji, Crystal Simone Smith, and Tyehimba Jess, performed by vocalists Viveca Richards, Reggie Mobley, and Will Liverman, accompanied by pianist Paul Sanchez.
Duke Arts hosted this living historical production, which featured award-winning performers who stated they were honored to use their talents as conduits for this project, which they hope will help make a difference in the world. During the Q&A that followed, a member of the audience noted how the outstanding vocalists' voices enlightened the text, describing these difficult historical periods through their emotional performances.
It was incredible to witness “Songs in Fight” performed live, especially after having spent time learning about the song cycle’s development with Prof. Jaji and her collaborators. As a poet and musician, it has been a joy to learn about how composers and writers can work together on projects like “Songs in Flight,” and it’s been especially insightful to hear how these artists worked with the “Freedom on the Move” database in creating these pieces. - Tyler King, ‘25, Biomedical Engineering and English
Duke Computer Science Professor Cynthia Rubin joined poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram in front of a packed room to present and discuss their works merging the world of poetry and technology. Rubin shared works of poetry that she, along with other scholars and Duke students, generated using a computer. The team programmed the computer to create poetic work from the prompts and coding parameters they provided: Meter-Grammar-Not Nonsense. They provided examples of how their work generated robotic poetry based on the elements fed into the system and how, over time, they produced poetic work more palatable to one's ear.
Poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram began their presentation by noting that in their work in the field, they are not obsessed with the machine providing perfect content but instead interested in the results and utilizing the mistakes via the blurriness of their words and the prompts fed to the technology. They noted that technology can be a haunting gateway into another world and strives to bring voices understudied to life via the digital age.
The poet discussed their usage of Warpland 2.0 and their role as the principal investigator for this project, funded by a Northeastern University Seedling Grant, which sponsors computational social science and digital humanities opportunities.
They spoke of how they utilized this technology to shed more light on the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and hope that with "fine-tuning," the model will someday generate works in the style of Brooks and others.
Bertram graced the audience with a reading from their book Negative Money before the event transitioned to a Q&A.
The Q&A led both guests to address questions from the audience about the collaboration of technology and the poetic world, how their relationship generates creative pieces, and what the future looks like for them. Members of the audience asked questions about the role of AI in the classroom, the human factors that are still needed to optimize the process in the developing world of AI, and how its innovation is enhancing the field of digital humanities.
This event fascinated me! I'm always interested in the creative process. How and why people make art generally is a constant source of interest for me, but poetry, in particular, always catches my eye. Trying to quantify what makes a "good" sonnet in the way Professor Rudin's presentation discussed helped me think about what AI can—and can't—do in relation to poetry. The technical proficiency of her models is remarkable, but is technical proficiency what we're most concerned with in art? It's always great to get in a room with others interested in poetry who think critically about what it is and how we can bring it into being. – Savannah Marciezyk, Duke English, PhD candidate
Duke English concluded its "Spring into Poetry" series by co-sponsoring "An Evening with Camille Dungy" in the Angle Amphitheater in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. This event was presented by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke Arts, and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens and co-sponsored by Duke's African and African American Studies and English departments.
Before reading, she conducted a poetry writing workshop with Duke undergraduates titled "Sprout Your Seeds: a Writing Workshop with Camille Dungy” in the Duke Garden Visitor Center Classroom. The workshop focused on ways that creative writers can view their works in the world around them. Dungy encouraged those in attendance to write beyond that which they are knowledgeable and consider their writing patterns. She stated that good writers are active readers and reminded them that we speak differently than we read and, therefore, must write differently. She suggested that writers read aloud during their editing process.
Camille Dungy's event was great! The setting was perfect for a poetry workshop; the Doris Duke Center at the Gardens is gorgeous. As someone who aspires to continue writing, I found Camille Dungy's story insightful and inspiring. And I thought the actual writing aspect of the workshop was great, too. She prompted us through several (surprisingly difficult!) writing exercises. One of them challenged us to describe something important to us while isolating it to a single, non-dominant sense, which pushed me to consider my subject from an overlooked perspective—and this was incredibly generative. Moving forward, I'd certainly like to integrate these exercises into my writing practice. – Ali Thursland, ’25, Computer Science and Creative Writing minor
Award-winning poet, 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship award recipient, and scholar Camille Dungy, who received her MFA from UNCG, read and discussed her memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden. In it, she recounts her seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado.
Duke English Professor Ranjana Khanna, director of the John Hope Franklin Institute (FHI), welcomed the audience to Duke Gardens for the Dungy reading and introduced Sharon Kunde, Postdoc Associate with FHI, who introduced Camille Dungy to the audience of 60+ gathered in the Duke Gardens on a hot Spring day for this event. Dungy honored the crowd by reading segments of her book.
Dungy concluded her reading with a poem she contributed to You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by Ada Limón, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States.
A Q&A session, book signing, and reception followed the reading.
Throughout the Spring 2024 semester, Duke English has sponsored, hosted, and co-sponsored poetry readings, workshops, and panels of poets discussing the genre. As we conclude the "Spring into Poetry" series, we look forward to our "Fall into Fiction" series during the Fall '24 semester. Please visit our website, english.duke.edu, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts to learn about our upcoming events.