Politically Engaged Poetry for the 21st Century

Sam Taylor

Thursday, 06 Nov 2014 at 7:00 pm – Sun Room, Memorial Union

Sam Taylor is the author of two books of poetry, Body of the World and Nude Descending an Empire. His work explores the contemporary moment, with an emphasis on politics, globalism and the urgency of our ecological crisis. Taylor spent three years as a caretaker in a remote wildlife refuge and cites the experience as an essential foundation of his work. He is an assistant professor in the MFA program at Wichita State University and the recipient of the 2014-2015 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. Environmental Imagination Series

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Nude Descending an Empire
Pitt Poetry Series, Fall 2014
Nude Descending an Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet engaged with history and our contemporary moment, especially its ecological urgency. Speaking not only as a citizen of the United States, but as a citizen of the world—and of what Martin Espada has called "The Republic of Poetry"—Taylor constructs a poetry that is political in that it recognizes that everything in our world is political, but that remains governed by mystery. Begun during several years the author spent caretaking a snowed-in wilderness refuge and completed after his reentry into the twenty-first century, the collection spans a gamut from primitive silence to hyper-modernity.

Cosponsored By:

• MFA Program in Writing & the Environment
• The Writers’ Guild of ISU​.
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)