Poets illuminate how society deals with war and loss

The insights of Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, May Sarton, W.B. Yeats, Naomi Shibah Nye, Allen Ginsberg and other poets will help put perspective on the events of Sept. 11 as part of a special afternoon at UW–Madison on Thursday, Oct. 25.

“The aim of this event is not to disseminate information, but rather to share with people at the university and in the larger community some powerful and illuminating reactions to loss, war and political dilemmas,” says Keith Cohen, “Witnessing and Remembering” organizer and chair of the UW–Madison Department of Comparative Literature.

The free public readings begin at 4:30 p.m., 1100 Grainger Hall, 975 University Ave. Readers of the works will include faculty, staff and students drawn from the fields of theater and drama, classics, literature, area studies, creative writing and more. Poets from the United States, England, Ireland, Poland, India, France, the Middle East, Sweden, the ancient world and elsewhere will be represented.

“Though the contexts of these poems are vastly different, they have a common educational value: They depict the way individuals have struggled to give voice to their emotions at times of stress or crisis,” Cohen says. “Poetry lasts — over time it witnesses, memorializes, heals. For those reasons it is something that society never has been able to do without.”