Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), The Circus, 210 S. First. $10. 764-5118.
On Jan. 9, local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal discuss how to book from rough draft to finished manuscript. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers. Also, Kourvo and Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects at 7 p.m. on Jan. 23.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate Branch, Westgate shopping center, 2503 Jackson. Free. 327-8301.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including Michigan fiction writer Yasin Abdul-Muqit and Colorado poet Ambalila Hemsell.
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Every 1st & 3rd Sun. Readings by featured poets, preceded by a poetry open mike.
Reading by Ting Gou, a U-M medical student and award-winning poet who recently published her debut chapbook, The Other House. .
7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
“Plato’s Self-Moving Myth: The Circulation of Plato’s Charioteer from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance”
Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Professor of Classical Studies
January 17, 12:30pm
Institute for the Humanities, 202 S. Thayer
In this lecture, Ahbel-Rappe discusses her book in progress, in which she investigates the reception of Plato’s Phaedrus, and especially the famous myth of the soul (Phaedrus 246-249), from late antiquity to the Renaissance, tracing the phenomenon of this text’s migration into exegetical traditions and languages far removed from the original site of Plato’s dialogue. The study relies on the core idea of the text network and asks if the text itself an agent of its own migration.
Recent work on text networks (Selden, McCracken, Lopez) investigating such multi-linguistic migratory texts as the Alexander Romance, Life of Aesop, or Barlaam and Josephat, focus on the trajectory of a text, a text that takes on its life and makes its home as an immigrant in foreign lands, among foreign tongues. What astonishes about these texts is that they often perform their very subject matter, and it has gone unnoticed that the myth of the charioteer in Plato’s Phaedrus fits this profile. What she means is that the myth is an allegory for the soul, whereas Plato defines the soul at Phaedrus 246 as a self-mover. The story itself, a tale of the embodied soul being out of place in the world and wandering through cycles of birth and death, finds its textual analogue as the text takes on a corporeality, a presence in space and time, and a diffuse, variegated voicing.
Former Humanities Institute fellow Sara Ahbel-Rappe is Professor of Classical Studies. She has written several books that focus on the trajectory of the Platonic tradition, from the Sokratikoi Logoi to the “last pagan professor,” Damascius. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Mellon Foundation, and Center for Hellenic Studies.
Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), The Circus, 210 S. First. $10. 764-5118.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
Literati is beyond delighted to celebrate Ann Arbor legend Keith Taylor and his latest collection of poems, The Bird-while, illustrated by Tom Pohrt.
“In a natural chronometer, a Bird-while may be admitted as one of the metres, since the space most of the wild birds will allow you to make your observations on them when they alight near you in the woods, is a pretty equal and familiar measure” (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Journal, 1838). Without becoming didactic or pedantic about the spiritual metaphor hidden in the concept of the “bird-while,” Keith Taylor’s collection evokes certain Eastern meditative poets who often wrote in an aphoristic style of the spirit or the mind mirroring specific aspects of the natural world.
The Bird-while is a collection of forty-nine poems that meditate on the nature—both human and non-human—that surrounds us daily. Taylor is in the company of naturalist poets such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver—poets who often drew from an Emersonian sensibility to create art that awakens the mind to its corresponding truths in the natural world. The book ranges from the longer poem to the eight line, unrhymed stanza similar to that of the T’ang poet Han-Shan. And without section breaks to reinforce the passing of time, the collection creates greater fluidity of movement from one poem to the next, as if there is no beginning or end, only an eternal moment that is suspended on the page. Tom Pohrt’s original illustrations are scattered throughout the text, adding a stunning visual element to the already vivid language. The book moves from the author’s travel accounts to the destruction of the natural world, even species extinction, to more hopeful poems of survival and the return of wildness. The natural rhythm is at times marred by the disturbances of the twenty-first century that come blaring into these meditations, as when a National Guard jet rumbles over the treeline upsetting a hummingbird, and yet, even the hummingbird is able to regain its balance and continue as before. At its core, Taylor’s collection is a reminder of Emerson’s idea that natural facts are symbols of spiritual facts.
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
Tom Pohrt is a self-taught artist who has illustrated numerous books including The New York Times bestseller Crow and Weasel by Barry Lopez. He recently illustrated Terrapin and Other Poems by Wendell Berry and Careless Rambles, a selection of poems by John Clare. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Every 1st & 3rd Sun. Readings by featured poets, preceded by a poetry open mike.
Reading by Ashwini Bhasi, a widely published local poet who describes her work as “poems to make sense of the mind-body connection of her chronic pain, life in India, and the duality of her experiences as a scientific data analyst and poet
7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
