Celebrating our common humanity uniting us all.
On September 22, 29, and October 6, 7:00 pm, the theatre company, Apollo’s Troupe, will stage the theatre adaptation of the critically-acclaimed epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, written by Michigan poet Frederick Glaysher and published in 2012 by Earthrise Press. Fresh from performing in May at Wayne State University’s Studio Theatre, this stage adaptation of Mr. Glaysher’s epic work in verse keeps intact much of the beautiful poetry that exemplifies this spectacular book while seeking to reach a new audience with its message of how poetry and artistry from all times and cultures can elevate the world and redefine our lives for the better.
Glaysher studied with Robert Hayden during the last year of his life, worked for him as a secretary, and editing his Collected Prose for the University of Michigan Press and his Collected Poems for Liveright. Glaysher holds two degrees from U of M, the latter a Master’s in English. When it came time for writing his epic poem, Glaysher knew he had to include Robert Hayden to try to honor his former teacher, mentor, and friend.
Taking place on the moon at the Apollo 11 landing site, a lone poet finds himself charged by Don Quixote and “The Parliament of Poets” to spread a new message of beauty, unity, and love to all nations of our fractured modern world. He is then sent to meet with the great poets, myths, and characters from history, East and West, to be mentored on his quest towards enlightenment and understanding.
The cast is comprised of the poet himself, as a persona, The Poet of the Moon, as well as five talented actors playing multiple roles including Don Quixote, Merlin the Magician, Jane Austen, Ann Arbor Poet Robert Hayden, Leo Tolstoy, the Biblical prophet-poet Job, the great Chinese poet Du Fu, the African Queen Sogolon, and many more. These actors are Dennis Kleinsmith as Don Quixote and Tolstoy (Theatre Nova, JET, Shakespeare in Detroit, etc.), Krystle Dellihue as Robert Hayden and Queen Sogolon from the Mali epic Sundiata (Shakespeare In Detroit, Matrix Theatre, Redbud, PTD), Alexander Sloan, also as Robert Hayden and Jorge Luis Borges (Open Book, Water Works, Hope College), Marley Boone, as the Fairy Queen and the Chinese Tang poet Du Fu (Williamston, St. Dunstan’s, several Philadelphia theatres), Patrick Grimes, as the African Flying Tortoise Mbeku, Merlin, Virgil, and William Blake (Redbud, Morris, Young People’s Theatre). The stage manager is Briana O’Neal, the new resident stage manager at Theatre Nova (Eastern MSU, Ann Arbor Civic Theatre).
In the canto with Robert Hayden, he invokes the passage from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body about one day there would be an American black poet who would sing for his people. Hayden then calls forth the fairies and magical beings from around the world, throughout time, to carry him and his “charge,” the Poet of the Moon, heavenward to the Apollo 11 landing site.
Based on staging by Jeff Thomakos, of the Michigan Michael Chekhov Studio, the show is a unique blend of poetry reading, protest play, and performance art with a powerful message of peace, love, and humanity on the tiny, blue marble floating in space that we all share together.
“I am very honored to try to bring this critically-acclaimed work, from one of Michigan’s most talented poets to life. I think it will be a unique and moving experience,” says Mr. Thomakos.
The show will be a Guest Production at Theatre Nova, 410 West Huron Street. Performances will take place 7:00 – 9:00 pm on Sunday evenings September 22, 29, and October 6. Tickets are at the door and online under Guest Productions, https://www.theatrenova.org/guest-productions $22 general, $15 students. Go to TheatreNova.org or EarthrisePress.Net for more information. Or call 248-453-4220. The Parliament of Poets can be purchased at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore.
Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, this talk will explore how B.K.S.Iyengar, (1918-2014) widely acclaimed as a man instrumental in bringing postural yoga to the West, came to understand yoga as an art and see himself as an artist.
The Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features our Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.
Please join us as we welcome River Coello to campus as our keynote speaker for National Coming Out Week 2019 and LGBTQ History Month 2019.
About River:
River Coello is a queer and trans multidisciplinary artist from Guayaquil, Ecuador living in Chicago, Illinois.
As an actor, River has appeared on various stage productions, having trained at Acting Studio Chicago, Second City Training Center, and the University of Michigan. As a writer, River’s work explores various liminalities of the human condition through a focus on River’s own identities and experiences, grounded in a deeply spiritual perspective.
Historian Patricia Cost speaks about the history of the Benton family, who, among other things, invented the Century family of typefaces. Ben Denzer speaks about his artists’ books as well as his creative projects, such as Ice Cream Books.
This event is part of the 2019 Ann Arbor Wayzgoose & Printing Festival. See more works by Ben Denzer and the U-M Library Book Arts studio at the Wayzgoose Vendor Fair.
Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River Back into the City, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.
Co-presented with the Community of Food, Society and Justice Conference, October 17-18. This conference will engage students, faculty, staff, farmers, and the community in rigorous dialogue around the challenges of meeting the nutritional needs of our communities, while also protecting the planet, promoting healthy lives, and ensuring food justice. The conference is free and open to the public, thanks to its co-sponsors: the U-M Residential College, East Quad Garden, Michigan Dining, U-M Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, U-M Sustainable Food Program, U-M Campus Farm, Knight Wallace House, U-M Program in the Environment, Michigan Law Environmental Law and Policy Program, U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, and the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speakers Series.
Based in Los Angeles,Lauren Bon is an artist who works with architecture, performance, photography, sound, and farming to create urban, public, and land art projects to galvanize social and political transformation. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River Back into the City, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.
Co-presented with the Community of Food, Society and Justice Conference, October 17-18. This conference will engage students, faculty, staff, farmers, and the community in rigorous dialogue around the challenges of meeting the nutritional needs of our communities, while also protecting the planet, promoting healthy lives, and ensuring food justice. The conference is free and open to the public, thanks to its co-sponsors: the U-M Residential College, East Quad Garden, Michigan Dining, U-M Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, U-M Sustainable Food Program, U-M Campus Farm, Knight Wallace House, U-M Program in the Environment, Michigan Law Environmental Law and Policy Program, U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, and the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speakers Series.
We welcome three incredible poets–Oliver Baez Bendorf, Suzi F. Garcia, & David Hornibrook–as part of our ongoing Poetry at Literati Series. A book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
Oliver Baez Bendorf’s debut full-length collection, The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.) was selected by Mark Doty for the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize. His second book, Advantages of Being Evergreen, won CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Poetry Competition and will be published September 10, 2019. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. He has been a featured reader at New Orleans Poetry Festival, The White House, Smith College, and Woodland Pattern. A recipient of honors and fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, Vermont Studio Center, and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Creative Writing, he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. https://www.oliverbaezbendorf.com/
Suzi F. Garcia is the author of the chapbook, Dear Dorothy: A Home Grown Fairytale, Skull + Wind Press, 2020. The daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, raised in Arkansas, she has an MFA in Creative Writing with minors in Screen Cultures and Gender Studies. Suzi is an Executive Editor at Noemi Press, where she has worked with authors such as the Blunt Research Group, Jennifer Tamayo, Roberto Tejada, Thirii Myint, and Vanessa Villarreal. Suzi is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondista, and participated in the first-ever Poetry Incubator at the Poetry Foundation. She is teaching a 2019 Telluride Association Summer Program seminar. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming from the Offing, Vinyl, Fence Magazine, and more. She has presented at PCA/ACA, AWP, and Console-ing Passions, among other national conferences.
David Hornibrook grew up in the suburbs of Detroit where he worked for many years as a caregiver and non-profit administrator. His poems have won multiple awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Hornibrook holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at the University of Michigan.
Literati Bookstore is pleased to be on hand to sell books for the Clements Library’s ongoing lecture series. This event features Jason S. Lantzer presenting his lecture Torn Asunder: Faith, Higher Education, Politics and the Davidson family during the Civil War. Literati will have copies of Jason’s related book, Rebel Bulldog, available for purchase.
About the lecture: The Davidson family of Indianapolis is a near-perfect microcosm of the United States during Civil War. With roots in the South, but living in the North the family’s ties to religious, education, and political leaders and institutions cast new light on the loyalties Americans felt towards their region, nation and the institution of slavery.
Central to the story is Preston Davidson, a Hoosier by birth, who fought for the Confederacy alongside his Virginian cousins. On the other side, stands his brother Dorman, who fought to preserve the Union. How these two ended up on opposing sides of the greatest conflict in American history is the story of how familial expectations, faith, higher educational opportunities, and political loyalties all played into the struggle over if the nation would be divided or united and whether or not slavery would flourish or be abolished.
Jason S. Lantzer holds a BA, MA, and PhD all from Indiana University. His research and writing interests center on the intersection of religion, politics, and law in American History. His book, “Rebel Bulldog: The Story of One Family, Two States, and the Civil War” was published in 2017. Dr. Lantzer serves as the Assistant Director of the Butler University Honors Program.
Pamela Reynolds will speak about her book The Uncaring, Intricate World: A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-85 (Duke 2019). Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, Reynolds is author of War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. As U-M Presidential Professor she conducted the 2001-02 Mellon Seminar: Contested Childhood in a Changing Global Order. Following her talk, she is available for further conversation at a reception and book signing held in her honor. Reception RSVP at lizgoode@umich.edu
Ellen Muehlberger (history, classical studies, Middle East studies) and Deborah Dash Moore (Judaic studies, history) discuss Muehlberger’s latest book, followed by Q & A.
Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying—not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge’s court but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. This book traces how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one’s actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. This emphasis on the experience of death ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one’s death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was initially meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one’s life tends to sharpen one’s scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Death imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas within late ancient Christian culture about just what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian adoption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of power’s heaviest baggage: the capacity to authorize violence against others
