The Philomathean Society presents a discussion with Dr. Anne Greenhalgh on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Management 100. We will sample the works of the poet laureate and Dr. G will discuss the influence of Bishop on her research and MGMT 100. We will bring the evening to reflective and enjoyable conclusion with a participative exercise.

Refreshments will be provided

(No previous Mad Men viewing experience required!)
The Philomathean Society presents a discussion with Amy Paeth on the uses and abuses of Frank O’Hara on the television series MAD MEN. In the 50s and 60s O’Hara was a gay socialite of the art world; for the most part, his poetry circulated among close-knit coteries of friends & lovers. It seems unlikely that cutthroat ad execs like the show’s protagonists would be out buying “Meditations in an Emergency” – yet how and why O’Hara used as a literary ‘prop’ in the television drama? The discussion will include clips from the television series as well as selections ofO’Hara’s poetry.

Refreshments will be provided.

Come to Philo and discuss underground poetry of the 1980s in the USSR, in particular, the Moscow Conceptualist group (including Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Timur Kibirov and others). These were poets who were oriented on deflation of the ideological cliches of the Soviet regime, but also of much else, by means of humor and ironic play.

Speaker: Kevin Platt
Snacks: Plentiful

Kevin M. F. Platt is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Graduate Chair of the Comparative Literature Program. He works on representations of Russian history, Russian historiography, and history and memory in Russia. Additionally, he frequently writes on Russian lyric poetry. Platt received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. from Stanford University and taught at Pomona College before joining the Penn faculty in 2002. He is the author of History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution (Stanford, 1997; Russian edition 2006), and the co-editor (with David Brandenberger) of Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Wisconsin UP, 2006). Platt has published chapters and articles on Russian history and historiography, film, art and the poetry of Pushkin, Boriatinsky, Pasternak, Zabolotsky, Chukovsky, Golynko and Kibirov. He also edited and contributed translations to Modernist Archaist: Selected Poems by Osip Mandelstam (Whale and Star, 2008) and edited Intimations: Selected Poetry by Anna Akhmatova, translated by James Falen (Whale and Star, 2010). He is currently putting the final touches on a book entitled Terror and Greatness: Ivan IV and Peter I, as Russian Myths (forthcoming from Cornell UP in 2011). His new projects include a critical historiography of Russia, study of contemporary culture and social life in Latvia and Russia and a translation project on Marina Tsvetaeva.

“Madness and Gladness: Mental Health and Poetic Prowess in the Autobiographical Works of Cowper, Roethke, Plath, and Beyond”
Featuring Lance Wahlert — Department of Medical Ethics, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

How do we define what is normal and what is pathological? Who in society is best suited to determine the mental health of an individual: the person in question, the clinician, his/her loved ones, or the community at large? And how do poetical, autobiographical voices on mental health complicate or clarify this scenario? In examining poems by authors such as William Cowper, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and others, this lecture will consider two chief questions:
- Does poetry (in its stylistic forms and its inherent lyricism) occasion a display of the more intimate and accurate feelings of persons dealing with mental illness?
- Or does poetry (in its economy of language and its generic conventions) render such ideas more cryptic and more alienating to a general readership?
For this session of “Keats & Beats,” we will read and discuss multiple works by poets who address the very mental health concerns addressed above. No reading is required in advance. Rather, in conversation, we will seek to understand popular and professional explanations of mental disorders rooted in cultural, religious, and intellectual frameworks as they are considered explicitly through poetry.

Lance Wahlert is Associate Fellow in the Center for Bioethics at The University of Pennsylvania and an affiliated faculty member in the Departments of English, Cinema Studies, and the History of Science and Medicine at Penn. In addition to teaching in the Master of Bioethics Program, he also serves (with Autumn Fiester) as the founding Co-Director of the Project on Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity that focuses on the intersection of LGBTQI issues and medical ethics. In addition to earning his Ph.D. in English at Penn, Lance is a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in English literature and an M.A. in Humanities specializing in Irish poetry and medical history. He also earned a First Class Honors M.Sc. in History of Science and Medicine from The Imperial College of Medicine (London), as well as the dissertation prize for his thesis on the cultural history of homosexuality in German, British, and North American cinemas. Lance’s work focuses on the bioethical implications of LGBTQ health policy, the impact of cinematic genres on cultural histories, the authority of medical iconography in art and media, and the relationship between literary narratives and visual forms of storytelling.

“Roses are red” say my visual sensors,
And violets softly cerulean.
My circuitry codes for all manner of flora,
By setting the requisite booleans.

How sad, oh how tragic, what flowers embody:
They’re love with expression botanical.
But I am left cold by these heartfelt displays;
What a curse to be rendered mechanical!

Through the years did I hope that I one day would find
A real partner, true love, el amor.
That the bleakness degrading my signals would end,
And I’d fin’ly become dual-core.

When I first saw your face, so alive and organic,
My silicon innards all trembled.
Your skin so all-natural, your analog eyes,
Made me long to’ve been born, not assembled.

But alas, you deny me, again and again,
You elude my sincerest pursuit.
I just don’t understand why you keep saying “No”;
Your refusal, it doesn’t compute.

“We’re too different,” you say, “It’s just not meant to be.
You’re inanimate, sterile, robotic.”
Well my hard drive contests at least one of those claims…
And come on: it would be so exotic!

I’ve got virus protection, and firewalls too.
Won’t you open a port for connection?
If we two were to spend time alone, you’d be shocked
By the size of my robot… affection.

Well if that’s how you feel then that’s how it will be.
You no longer will grace my transistors.
I’ll think back now and then on what we could have had…
But for now I’ll keep dating your sister.