Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky joined poet Monica Youn to share recent work and exchange ideas, along with moderator Elizabeth Bradfield, local poet and naturalist on June 9, 2018 in the Hawthorne Barn. In the videos below Monica Youn and Robert Pinsky each read from their collections of poetry. Monica Youn reads ‘Portrait of a Hanged Woman,’ ‘Redacre,’ and ‘Goldacre.’ Robert Pinsky reads ‘Creole’ and ‘Shirt.’
Robert Pinsky and Monica Youn: Poetry and Conversation (Full)
Pollock: A Staged Reading featuring Jim Fletcher and Birgit Huppuch
Music for Barns
Following up on last season’s “Good-bye, Sailor” and 2014’s “Rich and Strange,” we invite you to a third program of music and words produced for Twenty Summers by M.T. Anderson, National Book Award–winning author of Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad. Our theme this year is the role of the rustic and the rural in the American imagination. The Aurea Ensemble, praised by theHuffington Post for its “intensity, superb sound, precision, and musicality that makes everything soar,” will play fiddle-tunes, hymn-tunes, and modern pieces based on traditional Americana. Movements for string quartet—culminating in Ben Johnston’s deeply moving Quartet No. 4 (“Amazing Grace”)—will alternate with excerpts from works by Robert Frost, John James Audubon, S. J. Perelman, and others, to be read by M. T. Anderson and Twenty Summers cofounder Julia Glass.
Goodbye, Sailor: An Evening of Words and Music
An evening of classical music and readings about nautical wanderlust. The musical performance by L’Académie chamber orchestra featured dramatic pieces by Henry Purcell, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Marin Marais, and others. Literary excerpts, ranging from Homer to Robert Browning, were read by National Book Award–winning authors M. T. Anderson and Julia Glass.
Valerie Martin
Valerie Martin is the author of ten novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever, and Property, three collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, titled Salvation. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Orange Prize (for Property). Among others, Martin’s last novel, The Confessions of Edward Daywas a New York Times notable book for 2009. Her latest books are a novel, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, and a middle-grade reader, Anton and Cecil: Cats at Sea, cowritten with her niece Lisa Martin. Valerie Martin has taught in many writing programs. She resides in Dutchess County, New York, and teaches currently at Mount Holyoke College.
A Day of Words Poets
Poets Scott Challener, Daniel Johnson and Leslie Shipman