Poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming, whose newest book is Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit, discusses writing in the era of climate change – how we must join the sensual texture and discernment of poetry with the critical content of scientific writing to fully elucidate a rapidly changing world.

How can different forms frame your life in different ways? How do poetry and memoir tell different kinds of truths? Three of today’s most acclaimed cross-genre writers – Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), Sarah Manguso (The Guardians), and Meghan O’Rourke (The Long Goodbye) – address these questions and more in this special Saturday conversation.

Chart your own path through the exhibition Kimono: A Modern History and enjoy drop-in, interactive experiences with art and poetry. Participate in writing activities, listen to music, and explore gorgeous textiles while surrounded by treasures in the museum’s Japanese galleries.

View the evening's schedule of events on the Metropolitan Museum's website

Celebrated journalist, poet, and New York Times bestselling author Eliza Griswold, whose most recent book is the poetry and photography compilation I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, speaks on the intersections and overlap of her Middle East reportage and poetry.

Is there such a thing as a poet’s novel, a text which uniquely traverses boundaries between genres? Why do poets turn to novels? Poet and novelist Laynie Browne, whose most recent book is Lost Parkour Ps(alms), examines this erratic, hybrid and often elusive form.

For many people, childhood is the time we are most saturated with poetry, and young adulthood is when we are first compelled to write it. Matthea Harvey and Marilyn Nelson, leading poets and writers for children and young adults respectively, discuss how their poetic practices include and are influenced by their writing for young people.

Discussion 3:00pm
Reading 4:30pm

“One of the most influential poetry critics of his generation,” according to The New York Times, Harvard professor Stephen Burt has published three collections of poetry in addition to his many critical works. In this program, he’ll discuss "the paradoxical, conflicting role of the poet-critic or how to read your own work as if you didn't write it" – a useful skill for poets and writers of all kinds.

Can poetry function as closet drama, occurring offstage? At turns text, event, and chorus? In this three-day seminar and workshop, we'll move in successive forms -- from a close-read of Ingeborg Bachmann’s radio drama, “The Good God of Manhattan” (1958) alongside selections from her poetry, into the film and performance scripts of Kathy Acker, and finally to notes on her own work by Marguerite Duras, whose devotion to sound and disrupted linearity is basically a staging of poetic thinking.