Princeton professor (and alumna) Monica Youn has published the title poem of her new book, Blackacre (forthcoming from Graywolf Press), in the June edition of Poetry magazine. The long lyric sequence, an intense engagement with Milton’s 19th sonnet (On His Blindness), is also accompanied by an explanatory essay on the Poetry Foundation website. An excerpt follows below:

The New Yorker  and a new PBS documentary spotlight the poetry and conservation efforts of W.S. Merwin ’48 this week. The full story is online here.

Namkyu Oh ’16 performs “For My Little Cousins” at the 2015 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. You can check out more from Songline Slam Poets, Princeton’s undergraduate slam poetry collaborative, on their Youtube channel.

Here’s one highlight from the courses being offered in the fall. Check out our full list (under ‘Resources,’ above) for more.

Radical Poetics, Radical Translation (COM402 / TRA402) with Karen R. Emmerich, Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20. 

“This course invites students to consider not just what poems mean but how they mean and how that complicates, challenges, obscures, enlivens, or collides with the task of translation. We will look at forms of poetry that challenge the limits of the translatable, as well as radical translation methods that expand our notion of what translation is. Examples include poems written in made-up languages; unstable texts; homophonic and visual translation; erasure poetics; and multilingual poems. Exploring the places where poetry and translation meet (or diverge), we will put traditional concepts of originality and derivation to the test.”

Click for course details.

Click for more information from the Lewis center.

When you go away

by W.S. Merwin ’48

When you go away the wind clicks around to the north
The painters work all day but at sundown the paint falls
Showing the black walls
The clock goes back to striking the same hour
That has no place in the years

And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes
In one breath I wake
It is the time when the beards of the dead get their growth
I remember that I am falling
That I am the reason
And that my words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy

In 2009, W.S. Merwin, who graduated from Princeton in 1948, became one of only eight poets ever to win the Pulitzer Prize more than once. Merwin has said he felt like a “misfit” at Princeton, where he studied with R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman.