Panel: Distant Homelands

Moderator: Dr. David Marshall

Reading by Joseph Brodsky

Translations by Dr. Bill Gard

Panel: Politics in Poetry

Reading by Carolyn Forché

Introduced by Dr. Sandra Donaldson

Reading by Czeslaw Milosz

In this recording from March 23, 1983 during the 14th Annual UND Writers Conference, “The Centennial Year,” Czeslaw Milosz reads excerpts from The Selected Notebooks. He also reads “Calling to Order,” “A Song on the End of the World,” “Campo dei Fiori,” “[If I had to tell what the world is for me],” “[When the moon rises and women in flowery dresses are strolling],” “Esse,” “Bobo’s Metamorphosis,” “Magpiety,” “To Raja Rao,” “[You talked, but after your talking all the rest remains]” “[The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation],” “[And yet you experienced the flames of hell],” “[Pure beauty, benediction: you are all I gathered],” “Rivers,” “Ars Poetica,” “You Who Wronged,” “A Parable of the Poppy Seed,” and “So Little.”

Panel: Homelands and Short Story

Moderator: Dr. Sheryl O'Donnell

Reading by James Alan McPherson

Reading by Bobbie Ann Mason

Panel: Poetry and 100 Years

In this video recording from the 14th Annual UND Writers Conference on March 25, 1983, Richard Howard and James Merrill participate in a panel discussion titled “Poetry and 100 Years.” During their conversation, they discuss the poetic tradition of the past 100 years, with a particular focus on modernity. They also discuss Gertrude Stein, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Pater, and Robert Browning, among others. Moderator: Dr. Michael Anderegg.

Reading by Richard Howard

In this video recording from the 14th Annual UND Writers Conference on March 25, 1983, Richard Howard reads “A Voyage to Cythera” from his translations of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. He also reads “Charles Baudelaire, the Portrait by Nadar,” Decades (for Hart Crane), “The Giant on Giant-Killing,” “Vocational Guidance, with Special Reference to the “Annunciation” of Simone Martini,” and “Ithaca: The Palace at 4 a.m.”

Reading by James Merrill

In this video recording from March 25, 1983 during the 14th Annual UND Writers Conference, “The Centennial Year,” James Merrill reads "The School Play," "Broken Home," "The Pier Under Pisces," "Think Tank," and “Developers at Crystal River;" these poems were published posthumously in Collected Poems (2001). He also reads from The Changing Light of Sandover, specifically, passages from "Mirabell," "Scripts for the Pageant," and "Samos."