Rilking with Ariana Reines

This class is open to all levels. No application is needed, but registration is required; call (212) 431-7920 x12832 or email classes@poetshouse.org. Register early – first come, first served.

“Norris Embry said to me on Hydra one morning, when I was being / Supersensitive and profound on an unimportant subject, / ‘Kenneth, you’re Rilking!’ and there you were,” wrote Kenneth Koch in “Fame.” Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet of encounter — with love & lovers, with art & artists, with languages & traditions, which, as poets, are also our inherited obsessions, however ironically or irreverently we choose to approach them. Readings from Rilke’s extensive correspondence and works, including Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies, will be balanced by invitations to write, which is to say to Rilk, with all the rigor, humor, and candor we can muster.

Ariana Reines’ books of poetry are The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion; and Mercury. Known for her interest in bodily experience, the occult, new media, and the possibilities of the long or book-length poem, Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt on NPR’s Bookworm. Reines has taught at Columbia University and the European Graduate School, and was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley in 2009.

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