UPCOMING EVENTS

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• WU211 The Poetry Playground: A Beginner's Journey (Part II)

  • When
    21 Jun 2025
  •  
    1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    In person, to be shared after registration
  • Spaces left
    1

  Register

  

  The Poetry Playground: A Beginner's Journey (Part II)

   “A poet is, before anything else, a     person who is passionately in love with   language.”     W. H. Auden

  By popular demand from the initial attendees, we are offering a continuation of our 17 May poetry session.

  In the 21 June session, we will continue to discuss free verse and its wide-ranging influence and appeal and also explore prose poems, from their beginnings with Charles Baudelaire up through contemporary prose poems. We will have a writing exercise--possibly two-- based on the poems that we discuss.
  

  Course Description:

  If you’re passionate about, and fascinated by, words—from their deep meanings to their unique sounds to their typography on the page—but you've been intimidated by poetry, this three-hour workshop is for you.

  We will look at a variety of poems, ranging in dates from a seventeenth-century sonnet by William Shakespeare to Diane Seuss’ un-rhymed sonnets published in 2021. We will also study free verse and its rich and long history, with examples including Emily Dickinson, Guillaume Apollinaire, John Keats, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. We’ll discuss fundamental elements of poetry including structure, style and tone, voice, theme, sound and imagery.

  Finally, we will use some of the poems as departure points for two prompts to get you writing.

  Join us for a passionate and in-depth introduction to poetry—what it is and how it is—and share inspirations both on and off the page.

  
  

  About the Instructor: 

  

  Heather Hartley’s poetry collections include Adult Swim and Knock Knock, both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She was Paris Editor for Tin House magazine for over fifteen years.

  Her short fiction, poems, essays and interviews have appeared in or on PBS Newshour, The Guardian, The Literary Review and other venues. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent’s (UK) Paris School of Arts and Culture and has also taught at the American University of Paris and the University of Texas El Paso MFA program.

  www.heatherhartleyink.com

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• LU271 Café Littéraire: Ballerina (La Danseuse), by Patrick Modiano

  • When
    27 Jun 2025
  •  
    3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    To be announced
  • Spaces left
    1

  Register

  

  From Amazon: Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator’s love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past, even as she tries to escape that past through her art. Set in the shimmering world of the Paris ballet, a world populated by giants such as Balanchine and Nureyev, Ballerina revisits the themes of memory, desire, and ineffable danger that have become hallmarks of Patrick Modiano’s fiction.
   
  Focusing on the dancer’s troubled relations with her young son, her enigmatic involvement with the narrator, her mysterious past entanglements, and the tension between the narrator’s past and present selves, Modiano’s novel is both a nostalgic evocation of the world gone by and a haunting exploration of time lost and regained.
   
  In deceptively weightless prose, deftly translated by Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano interrogates the clash of current and vanished realities, the paradox of growing older, and the spectral persistence of love.
  

  
  

  Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 23 June, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

  
  

  The book group meets at the organizer's apartment. The directions, door code, telephone number, etc., are sent in the 7-day and 1-day reminder emails, following registration.

  Registration for the June meeting opens on 23 May 2025.
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

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