Eco-Crisis Poetry: Rae Armantrout in Conversation

Join us for a session with poet Rae Armantrout as she explores the relationship between poetry and environmental crisis. Armantrout will read and discuss selected eco-poems from her collection Go Figure (2024) and recent unpublished works that examine human awareness and the impact of ecological loss. Moderated by Bridget Vincent, who researches and teaches in poetics and climate change, this session invites participants to consider how poetry can contribute to our understanding of environmental challenges and foster discussions about our ecological future.

Rae Armantrout Writing for the Poetry Foundation, David Woo says that Rae Armantrout’s recent book Finalists (Wesleyan 2022) “emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Her 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Her other books with Wesleyan include Partly: New and Selected Poems, Just Saying, Money Shot and Versed. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2007 she received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry,Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Bomb, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. Retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics, she is the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. A new book, Go Figure, has recently appeared from Wesleyan University Press.

Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her first book, Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. She writes on modern literature and ethics, and her specific research interests include: public apology in twentieth century writing; ekphrasis; the lyric essay; ecocriticism; and literary attention. Before coming to the ANU, she taught literary criticism at the universities of Nottingham and Cambridge.