Poems for Camilla and Other Truths (Greece Under Water)

In this event, Rachel Hadas will read from her 2018 collection, Poems for Camilla.  This book, occasioned by both the birth of a granddaughter and the inauguration of Donald Trump early in 2017, constantly dips into Virgil's Aeneid, pulling lyric out of epic and binding imperial Rome to our own troubled times.  Also synchronic and multi-layered, Shalom's video Other Truths (Greece Under Water) is a portrait of the Greek financial crisis which draws upon Plato, Sappho, and Euripides as well as images and music to present a powerful and nuanced portrait of a culture and place in distress.  Other Truths includes passages from Rachel's recent verse translation of Euripides' tragedy Iphigenia in Auilis, as well as a recording of Rachel's father, the classicist Moses Hadas, reading from Plato's Apology.

Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, memoir, and translation.  Her recent books include a memoir, Strange Relation (2011), selected prose, Talking to the Dead (2015), and two collections of poetry, Questions in the Vestibule (2016) and Poems for Camilla (2018).  She is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University Newark.

Shalom Gorewitz has been creating visiaul art, including video installations, since the late 1970s, and has long collaborated with artists working in other mediums - musicians, dancers and choreographers, performance artists, writers, and sculptors - around the world and across the United States.  He is Professor of Video Art and New Media at Ramapo College.

Thursday, February 14, 2019
4:30 - 6:00 PM, Carpenter 013

This event and associated ampus visit is sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Center Classroom Enhancement Grants, the departments of Classics, English and Creative Writing, and Film and Media Studies, and the Comparative Literature Program.