Wed 4/20 @ 7PM
Cleveland-based poet and John Carroll University professor of English Philip Metres has long had a special interest in Russian poetry. He spent a year after college graduation on a fellowship in Russia studying contemporary poetry there. He’s published several volumes of translations of Russian poets between putting out numerous volumes of his own, including his new Pictures at an Exhibition. And he’s won a pile of awards for his work including the Cleveland Arts Prize and the Creative Workforce Fellowship.
The press release says that Pictures at an Exhibition “[wrestles] with the questions of travel, memory, and perception” and “is, at its core, an unrequited love song to St. Petersburg. The fever dream of Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Akhmatova, St. Petersburg is the occasion for a broader meditation on all we come to love and lose.”
Metres will be at the Happy Dog at the Euclid Tavern to present a talk titled From the “Evil Empire” to Abu Ghraib: A Poet’s Journey into Enemy Spaces, and engage in a conversation with former Cleveland Heights poet laureate Kathleen Cerveny.
The event is being presented as part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival. It’s free.
happydogeuclidtavern.getn2.it/PhilipMetres
Cleveland, OH 44106