Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Ó Tuama has become a shepherd in the shambolic tradition of contemporary spirituality, treating poetry as a form of agnostic prayer. Poetry, for him, is the language the heart speaks not when it reaches for some externalized divinity but when it seeks to understand itself. —The New Yorker
A poem is a word event going in many directions at once. Sometimes the you of a poem is a specific person, other times it’s the poet, other times it’s a general audience, and still other times, there’s no you at all, so the poem addresses itself to the world. This evening Pádraig Ó Tuama will explore the direction, implication and inspiration contained in poetic verse.
Pádraig Ó Tuama‘s recent PH.D. dissertation examined — among other things — the you of a poem. He presents the Poetry Unbound podcast from On Being Studios, and lectures and speaks widely. His recent publications include Poetry Unbound; 50 Poems to Open Your World (WW Norton 2022) and Feed the Beast (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). Kitchen Hymns is forthcoming in 2024.