WEBVTT

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Chris Nelson is going to
introduce the amazing Mary Jo

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Bang.

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[CHEERS, APPLAUSE]

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Mary Jo Bang is the author
of six books of poetry,

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including Elegy, for which
she received the National Book

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Critics Circle Award,
and most recently,

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The Bride of E. Her
translation of Dante's Inferno

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will be published next year.

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Among her many honors are
fellowships from the Guggenheim

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Foundation and
Princeton University.

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And twice, she has won the
Alice Fay Di Castagnola

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Award from the Poetry
Society of America.

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She joins us tonight
from St. Louis,

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where she is a
professor of English

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at Washington University.

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Her poems delight in
their range of thinking,

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how far we travel in the short
distance of one of her pages,

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turn after turn after turn.

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And her formal
inventiveness has made

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contemporary the ancient
forms of elegy and abecedarian

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Of her work, the poet,
Richard Howard, has said,

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"Mary Jo Bang is
writing the English

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of our second millenium,
worthy of the first,

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indeed, traipsing
the chasm between."

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I'm reminded, tangentially,
of the philosopher Soren

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Kierkegaard, who
encouraged a leap of faith

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from the figurative
chasm edge, a leap

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into a subjective commitment to
the infinite, to God, name it,

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as the only antidote
for the world's grief.

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I disagree with him.

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There are other
palliatives, such as poetry

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of the caliber of
Mary Jo Bang's,

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a poetry of
intellectual ambition,

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and an ethical
fidelity to truth,

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if you'll allow me to
use such a big word.

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She has described the
concerns of her poetry as "How

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the brain works, how
one constructs a self,

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how one contends with
existential aloneness."

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Aesthetically, she tries to
lessen the terrible weight

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of these questions.

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And lessen that weight she
does with humor, with irony,

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with illusion, and with
a bright awareness,

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both fierce and humane.

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Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome Mary Jo Bang.

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[APPLAUSE]

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