Renowned poets provide insight into the poetry of Polish master Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) and discuss his witty, probing essays on travel, classical literature and visual art.

Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence offers an introduction to the poetic style and aural beauty of the Qur’an and discusses the challenge of translating archaic Arabic into modern-day English.

A World War I medical officer and brilliant poet whose work attracted the patronage of Wittgenstein, Georg Trakl (1887–1914) and his sinister, imagistic poems are taken up by three American poets.

Part of the Annual Chapbook Festival, Wednesday, March 2–Saturday, March 5

Visual artist and poet Jen Bervin and Ugly Duckling Presse editor and poet Anna Moschovakis discuss the way the chapbook has shaped their work, sharing highlights from their own collections and the Poets House archive.

Poets House @ the 2011 AWP Conference in Washington, DC

This poetry reading celebrates the Language of Conservation, a nationwide Poets House program aimed at deepening awareness of the environment.

Admission free for registered AWP Conference participants. For details, visit www.awpwriter.org

Poet and editor Daniela Gioseffi traces transcendentalist themes in American poetry, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes, June Jordan and Mary Oliver.

This afternoon features a group presentation by contributors to The Grand Piano, a ten-book experiment in autobiography by ten writers affiliated with Language Poetry in San Francisco. A panel discussion moderated by Catherine Taylor follows.

Creating art in response to poetry since the 1960s, Ed Colker has "produced pure expressions, stirring symbols of inner truths or imaginings that can sometimes be inspired by or incite poetry" (New York Times).

These works on paper bring together text and image in what Star Black describes as “visual pages,” which, like linguistic acts of creation, are “brief and bounded by space.”

Poet and photographer Star Black is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Ghostwood. Her photographs are in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. Her collages have been exhibited in various galleries in New York City and Long Island.

The exhibit “Walking, Poems & Buildings” features poems and architectural models of a bus shelter, a “writer’s hut” and a nature observation center created collaboratively by students of poet Annie Finch and architect Ben Jacks at Miami University. This show explores the ways in which architects and poets build and inhabit durable and harmonious forms, and how walking creates a rhythmic link between the two pursuits.