Richard Deming and Nancy Kuhl

Richard Deming will read from his latest collection of poems, Day for Night; the work takes its title from the cinematic term for shooting night scenes during the day. Deming’s complex lyricism explores the ways that art, film, music, and literature creates possibilities for human encounter and interaction even as it considers the impossibilities of ever truly knowing others or ourselves.  Deming is an art critic as well as a poet; he studies and writes about the philosophy of literature and visual culture.

Nancy Kuhl will from a recent chapbook about bird watching—and listening—called The Birds of the Year and from her recent full-length collection of poems, Pine to Sound. In this work, the mythic figure of Echo appears and recurs literally and sonically—punished for her incessant talking with the loss of all speech save her ability to repeat the last words she hears, Echo here represents something of the powerful ways dialogue is always shot through with repetitions and echoes that both assert and occlude the emotional content of our speech. 

Richard Deming’s collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber First  Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His new book of poems,  Day for Night, appeared last year.  Winner of the Berlin Prize in 2012, he teaches at Yale University where he is the Director of Creative Writing.

Nancy Kuhl is the author of Pine to Sound, Suspend, and The Wife of the Left Hand and chapbooks including Little Winter Theater, The Nocturnal Factory, and In the Arbor.  She is Curator of Poetry of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. http://www.phylumpress.com/kuhl/