On November 6, the Georgetown University Library Associates hosted a sold-out crowd to hear professors Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu discuss their recent anthology, Poetry of Witness. If you missed the event, you can now watch it on the Library’s website!
Poetry of Witness features the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture and slavery. Echoing Forché’s groundbreaking scholarship on this topic, the work illuminates the full range of the human experience. Alongside Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, the volume includes such writers as Anne Askew, tortured and executed for her religious beliefs during the reign of Henry VIII; Phillis Wheatley, abducted by slave traders; Samuel Bamford, present at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819; William Blake, who witnessed the Gordon Riots of 1780; and Samuel Menashe, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge.
At their lecture, Forché and Wu described their approach to the project, discussed its importance in the scholarly record and read several thought-provoking and affecting excerpts.
The Library is grateful to the Casey-McIlvane family, whose endowment provided support for this event. The Casey-McIlvane Endowed Library Lecture Fund was established in memory of Francis L. Casey, Jr., C’50, L’53, and in honor of the Reverend Donald W. McIlvane, F’46 through the generous joint gift of Nancy McIlvane Del Genio, F’82 and the late Roseanne McIlvane Casey, S’79.