Boston Poetics Workshop
The Boston Poetics Workshop is a forum for poetry and poetics, organized around a monthly works-in-progress series. We seek to generate a space for sustained conversations about poetry that spans any number of languages, time periods, and regions. The workshop is open to presentations by scholars and poets. These presentations may be wide-ranging in focus and form, from poetry criticism and analysis to drafts of poems or translations. To date, our meetings have brought together scholars from Boston University’s English, World Languages and Literatures, Classics, and History departments. Past and prospective discussion participants also include poets and scholars from Harvard, Northeastern, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. We welcome undergraduate participation in the sessions.
As an intellectual endeavor, the workshop seeks to hold space for questions of comparison, method, and the necessary conditions for engagement with work that is familiar to us and beyond the scope of our existing knowledge and experience. In soliciting diverse creative and scholarly workshop contributions, we maintain an openness to work that makes its comparative aspects known and work that is deeply situated in a tradition, region or archive.
BPW is run by Kilachand Honors College postdocs Talia Shalev and Sravanthi Kollu, and is supported by funding from Kilachand Honors College and the BU Center for Humanities. To learn more about the workshop or to subscribe to BPW’s newsletter, send an email to bostonpoetics@gmail.com.
BPW’s work-in-progress sessions meet once a month from 12-1:30 pm at Kilachand Honors College (91 Bay State Road). Lunch will be provided. RSVP in the dropdown below.
Spring 2025 Series
January 31, 2025 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Sunil Sharma (BU World Languages and Literatures), “Translating Persian Love Lyric and Satire: Two Sides of the Same Coin”
Respondent: Rebecca Moorman (BU Classics)
February 28th, 2025 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Sravanthi Kollu (BU Kilachand Honors College), “No Word is a Synonym: Comparing Indian Romanticisms”
Respondent: Bonnie Costello (Professor Emeritus, BU English)
March 28th, 2025 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Sassan Tabatabai (BU World Languages and Literatures), “The double-edged sword of literary translation: Translating Persian to English and English to Persian”
RSVP Here
April 25th, 2025 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Isabel Sobral Campos (Northeastern English), “Entr’acte: a work-in-progress”
Respondent: Nina Mouawad (Northeastern English)
RSVP Here
Fall 2024 Series
September 20, 2024 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
AJ Gold (Harvard College Writing Program), Frank O’Hara’s Death and Legacy
October 25, 2024 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, 9th Floor, Rm 920
Anita Patterson (BU English), “Modernist Legacies of Black Resistance: Gwendolyn Brooks and The Bean Eaters (1960)”
November 22, 2024 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Vidyan Ravinthiran (Harvard English), “Poetry and Opinion”
Respondent, Keith Vincent (BU World Languages and Literatures)
December 13, 2024 @ 12-1.30 pm
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Elif Irem Az (Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies), “The Black Shape of Living”
Respondent, Carroll Beauvais (BU Writing Program & Kilachand Honors College)
Spring 2024 Series
January 26, 2024 @ 12-1.30 PM
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Boston Poetics Workshop, Inaugural meet-and-greet
February 23, 2024 @ 12-1.30 PM
Kilachand Hall, 9th Floor
Prof. Laurence Breiner (BU English), “Semantic Space and Decolonization in Anglophone West Indian Poetry”
March 29, 2024 @ 12-1.30 PM
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Noa Saunders (PhD Candidate, BU English), “Emergency and Emergence: The Affective Politics of Immediacy in Frank O’Hara and Diane di Prima”
Respondent, Prof. Stephanie Burt (Harvard University, English)
April 26, 2024 @ 12-1.30 PM
Kilachand Hall, Common Room 101
Prof. Keith Vincent (BU World Languages and Literatures), excerpts from “I, who go…”: Masaoka Shiki and the Invention of Haiku