Monday September 22, 2014

OPENING EVENT

Location: Charlotte Hanes Gallery Scales Fine Arts Center (SFAC). 5:00 pm.

Jorge Otero’s work will be presented as part of Seis Miradas por Latinoamérica, centered on the poetry of Pablo Neruda and its reflection in music and art. Professor Patricia Dixon, director of this interdisciplinary program, will introduce Chilean composer/guitarist Javier Farías, and share his contributions to this international project.

Jorge Otero’s family was a part of the post-1959 Cuban Diaspora.
Otero’s images reflect a culture that has historically valued the poetic imagination. Like Neruda’s work, Otero’s varies stylistically across many subjects. Whether evincing an abstract-classical, a lingering romantic, or even a surrealist sensibility, his photos often have an elegiac flavor.

Premiere of Javier Farías “Recinto de la Piedra” for four guitars and two narrators (Spanish and English) inspired on chapters 1 to 6 from “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” from El Canto General by Pablo Neruda
Quartet features: John Kossler, Nick Bennett, Drake Duffer and Lando Pieroni
Narrators: Patricia Dixon and Dr. Edwin G. Wilson.
Location: September 22, Charlotte Hanes Gallery Scales Fine Arts Center (SFAC). 5:00 pm.
Reception

Tuesday September 23, 2014

Concert: Seis Miradas por Latinoamérica: Homenaje a Pablo Neruda
Six Perspectives of Latin America: Homage to Pablo Neruda
Pre-concert talk with composer Javier Farías and Patricia Dixon

Location: Room 208 -SFAC 6:30. p.m.

Wednesday September 24, 2014

Lecture: "Pablo Neruda and the Ruins of Inter-Americanism"

Guest Speaker Harris Feinsod is assistant professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. His recent writing appears in the forthcoming American Quarterly, Chicago Review, Telos, Arcade, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for which he was assistant editor. His current book project is a literary history of hemispheric poetry relations during the Cold War.

Location: ZSR Library Auditorium 4:30 p.m.

Lecture: "Pablo Neruda and the Ruins of Inter-Americanism"

Poems about the pre-Columbian ruins of the Americas are often understood as forms of neo-romantic meditation, as expressions of universal humanism, or as exercises in postmodern tourism. This talk offers another proposition. After spotlighting the roles of poets such as Pablo Neruda in World War II-era hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives, I argue that a postwar genre of ruin poetry, galvanized by Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1947), developed as an oblique form of political poetry responding to the rapid demise of the movement for hemispheric democracy after 1945. I show how Neruda sparked a rich genre of ruin poetry—by writers as various as the young Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Martín Adán, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Ernesto Cardenal—who expressed moral identifications with the indigenous civic histories of the Americas as a mechanism for critiquing the Cold War collapse of political and cultural inter-Americanism. Further tracking the way in which Neruda's poems offered compensations for faultlines in the geopolitical imaginary of the hemisphere, I will describe Neruda's shifting conception of inter-American poetry by illustrating the relations of several key poems to a network of U.S. and Latin American poets around the years 1943, 1950, 1966 and 1972.

Thursday September 25, 2014

Concert: Seis Miradas por Latinoamérica: Homenaje a Pablo Neruda
Six Perspectives of Latin America: Homage to Pablo Neruda

Recital by John Kossler Alumnus (2011)

Location: Brendle Recital Hall SFAC 7:30 p.m.