USC Poetry Reading + The Broad: Tour of the Imagination

Organized by award-winning poet and University of Southern California Professor of English, Carol Muske-Dukes, this special one-night public reading is The Broad's contribution to National Poetry Month. As part of a USC graduate course entitled A Tour of the Imagination, each of Muske-Dukes' current PhD students will read a poem before the art work which served as inspiration. The reading will be fulfillment of an ongoing collaborative process between image and word: these poets have earlier chosen an individual work of art from the Broad collection, then spent hours "in conversation" with their selection, composing the poem.

Students + Works:

Mary Daniel: African't, Kara Walker

Sara Fetherolf: Yellow Bird, Mark Bradford

Grant Klarich Johnson: Invisible Sun (algorithm 8, fable form), Julie Mehretu

Liz Johnson: Big Orange, Sam Francis

Elise Suklje Martin: Under the Table, Robert Therrien

Kate Partridge: Rouen Cathedral, Set 3, Roy Lichtenstein

Safiya Sinclair: Double America 2, Glenn Ligon

Callie Siskel: The Rose (V), Cy Twombly

The evening's final reading will be an ensemble effort in the form of a "crown of sonnets" in response to Takashi Murakami's massive eighty-two-foot long painting, In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014). 

Please note the audience will be standing throughout the evening and walking short distances. Wheelchair accessible. No seating available in the museum galleries.

This program is now sold out. Additional tickets may be available onsite before the program begins.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZER

Carol Muske-Dukes is professor of English at the University of Southern California and a former Poet Laureate of California. The most recent of her eight books of poems is Twin Cities (Penguin). Earlier books of poems include Sparrow (Random House), a National Book Award finalist, and others. She has published four novels and two collections of essays. She co-edited the poetry anthology Crossing State Lines: an American Renga (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) and two children's poetry "handbooks" - The Magical Poetry Blimp Pilot's Guide, parts 1 and 2. Muske-Dukes has been the recipient of awards and honors including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Library of Congress award, a Castagnola Award, and an Ingram/Merrill award. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, she is anthologized widely and her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, SLATE, the Atlantic, APR, and more. Carol Muske-Dukes has been a visiting professor at Columbia's MFA Program, the Iowa Writers Workshop, the University of Virginia graduate MFA Program, and UC Irvine's MFA Program, and has been a Visiting Rea Writer at University of Virginia.