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DPR's National Poetry Month Celebration ep.3

Delmarva Public Radio’s celebration of National Poetry Month continues this week with the third in our series of four lectures on significant  poetic themes.  

Our speaker is Holly Karapetkove, chair of the Literature and Languages Department at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. In her talk, Holly explores the poetry of witness. The term witness speaks of many relationships: to witness something, to testify to something witnessed, to testify to and process something experienced. Holly’s focus in her talk is on poetry that testifies to traumatic events both witnessed and experienced and why poetry is uniquely suited as a witness to trauma. Poetry is trying to say something, she says, that can’t be captured in words. It’s an effort to fix on the page something that is ineffable about the human experience. Being human is bound up in language, she says. Well, let me add, why do we write, if it’s not to bear witness to the world, grapple with its inexpressible meanings, and sort out who we are.

Holly’s lecture was recorded in February by Delmarva Public Radio before a live audience at Marymount University.

Chris Ranck is Delmarva Public Media's Executive Producer, Program Director and Automation Engineer.
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