The Blaney Lecture

The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics is offered annually by a prominent poet. Past lectures have been given by Elizabeth Alexander, Richard Blanco, Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Susan Howe, Adrian Matejka, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Claudia Rankine, and Patricia Smith.

Black and white headshot of Dr. Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney against a blue background with text that reads "Dr. Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney"

Join us on Thursday, March 7, at 4:30 p.m. PT / 7:30 p.m. ET (online) for the 2024 Blaney Lecture: "Making the Invisible Visible: Poetry, Science, Perception-Increase, and Change" delivered by Jane Hirshfield, Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Free to attend with registration. Closed captioning provided.

The lecture was created in memory of former Academy of American Poets Board member Dr. Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney, past president of Cedar Crest College and champion of women and education, by a gift from her estate.

Both poems and science are tools for making visible what was always there to be seen. Both also create new ways of seeing, feeling, knowing, living. Amid the crises, griefs, divisions, and losses of the current era, this talk explores a few examples of the ways that expansions of saying and knowing are also expansions of what might be possible, thinkable, doable.

Jane Hirshfield's latest book is The Asking: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023). Hirshfield was awarded the 2004 Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets.

Past Blaney Lectures

Patricia Smith, The Scrawny Little Black Girl with the Hasty Pigtails Sounds Out ‘Anemone,’ 2023