“What is this wild prayer of longing that issues from the heart?” Nathan Scott Jr. writes.
In a secular age, modern and contemporary poetry has been concerned with where the sense of the sacred and the numinous can be found outside the parameters of traditional religious doctrine.
One might look at the moments when we can suddenly “rejoice with things”; we might consider religious hope and despair as permanent conditions in the depths of the mind.
Two poets from the Bay Area will read from their own work and the work of some of the poets they most admire, and will engage in a dialogue about poetry and the sacred.
JEANNE FOSTER, Professor Emerita, Saint Mary’s College, and ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, addresses in an early book, A Music of Grace, what continues to be a compelling concern: poetry and the sacred. Her other books include A Blessing of Safe Travel; Goodbye, Silver Sister; Appetite; and the award-winning translation with Alan Williamson of The Living Theatre: Poems of Bianca Tarozzi.
ALAN WILLIAMSON recently retired from the University of California, Davis, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His books of poems include The Pattern More Complicated and Franciscan Notes. His sixth book of criticism, Dante and the Night Journey is forthcoming. He and Jeanne Foster co-translated The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi.