[Yale-readings] "Imagining Global Lyric" Readings -- Robin Coste Lewis CANCELLED

[Kuhl, Nancy]

EVENT CANCELLED
Robin Coste Lewis
Wednesday, November 1, 2023 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle | HQ 136

[Robin Coste lewis Headshot (c) K. Miroire]
Robin Coste Lewis
POET
Wednesday, November 1, 2023 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle | HQ 136
 To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness<https://whc.yale.edu/realization-perfect-helplessness>

Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother's death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis's family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of "race" and "migration," placing them within a much vaster span of time and history. From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us "an exalted Black privacy." What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center.

Robin Coste Lewis is the former Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Her service as Poet Laureate of Los Angeles focused on truth and reconciliation projects dealing with the city's history. Her poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015), was honored with the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. Her next book, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, is a genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration to change the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure.


Link to the full series: https://whc.yale.edu/lectures/franke-lectures-humanities.

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