Modern American poetry on the Arts Team Show (Burn FM)

• Organisers: Dr Rona Cran (American and Canadian Studies Centre) and Luke Carr (Burn FM)

The American and Canadian Studies Centre and Burn FM are teaming up to showcase some of the most important poetry to emerge from the United States and Canada in the twentieth-century. Through a short talk and a series of readings by staff and students from the American and Canadian Studies Centre and the English Department, we hope to explore the ways in which American poetry repeatedly draws attention to expressive freedoms, to cultural locations, and the socio-political moments from which they emerge, and to discuss their ongoing relevance today.

The poems to be featured include: 

• John Ashbery, They Dream Only of America
• Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You
• Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California
• Matthew Zapruder, Starry Wizards
• Audre Lorde, A Litany for Survival
• Claude McKay, America
• Bernadette Mayer, Essay
• Adrienne Rich, Diving Into The Wreck
• Leonard Cohen, The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homeward
• Muriel Rukeyser, To Be A Jew In the Twentieth Century
• Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again
• Louise Erdrich, Captivity
• Julia Alvarez, On Sundays
• Alice Notley, 30th Birthday
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wild Dreams of a New Beginning
• James Schuyler, Buried at Springs
• Gwendolyn Brooks, my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
• Eileen Myles, An American Poem
• Margaret Atwood, In This Secular Night