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We warmly invite you to join us for our second event of Winter Quarter, Thursday 2/29 at 4:00pm Pacific Time in Pigott Hall Room 216. Refreshments will be served. 
Please RSVP for the event if you plant to attend:

Professor Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) will present a part of her new project, “What is Poetry?"

For centuries, a lot of people have thought that the problem with poetry is poems. Some readers worry that they cannot understand poems because poetry escapes them; some worry that poetry is what escapes poems, since poetry is too ideal, too ineffable to have a local habitation and a name.  These concerns are two sides of the same coin, and the thing worth thinking about in both cases is the economy in which that coin gains value.  When we discuss poetry as something that Plato held at a distance or that Socrates taught Ion to appreciate or that Sidney defended or that Mill refined out of existence or that Terrance Hayes knows how to write, we are pretending that poetry is and has always been one thing.  Yet we all know that is not true.  Poetry is not the problem with poems.  Poems are the problem with poetry, since of poetry, poems are all we have. So why haven't we wanted to think so?

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