Tagged: poetry

Texts and video from our Spring community reading

On the evening of April 14, 2021, an audience of classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends of the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum came together to hear faculty and staff share favorite texts which speak somehow to our present moment of isolation, separation and anxiety, as Auden did in his poem “Age of Anxiety.” Here is […]

The poems of the 2020 Core Poetry Reading

On the evening of April 15th, four and a half dozen classmates, alumni, lecturers, and friends, all members of the extended community we call the BU Core, came together on Zoom for our traditional spring poetry reading, an event Core has organized for nearly two decades. Despite a hitch at the start (we were Zoom […]

The Evolution of “Instapoetry”

Anyone with an Instagram account should recognize this kind of poetry- printed in a typewriter font, preaching love and positivity, and never more than a few words in a few lines. “Instapoets” have become a new sensation, with these writers collecting thousands to millions of followers for their craft. And why not? The images are […]

Three Nineteenth-Century Poets on Night

Now that we’re in the thick of the semester, we’re all lacking for a full night’s sleep. Here is what three of the English Romantics had to say about the subject of night. The Sun Has Long Been Set William Wordsworth The sun has long been set, The stars are out by twos and threes, […]

Reading the Romantics

Here follows the set-list of texts read at the Annual Core Poetry Reading, held this year on April 11, 2017 (this information is listed in the 2017 Core Almanac, part of the Core Journal published this year, Issue 26: http://bu.edu/core/journal/xxvi): Zachary Bos read After Reading Keats’ Ode by W. H. Auden Extracts from a letter […]

When Humanities and Natural Sciences Meet

It can be strange to think sometimes of the humanities and sciences meeting. A poetic stanza has very little to do with a mathematical equation one would think; not Edna St. Vincent Millay. In this poem, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”, the Father of Geometry can see what poets, those so attuned to […]

e.e. cummings, the fearless

It seems impossible, sometimes, to delight in the new and exciting. Look at early critics’ and the general public’s reaction to most of modernism for instance. Scorned, scandalized, generally rejected (thank god enough liked it to keep it preserved). And the new can be exhausting in whole other ways. Most of us moved towns even […]

Progressing through Poetry

The late 19th and early 20th century gave birth to some of our world’s favorite poets and poetry, something that could be written off as simple proximity, but we at Core believe what makes these writers so important was not only the still resonating effects of political and societal changes they commented on but also […]

Visiting Writers Series: Joseph Campana

The News Report covered Joseph Campana’s campus visit on Friday September 27th as part of the creative writing program’s Visiting Writers Series. Joseph is a Renaissance poet, scholar and critic, and has been a Core instructor!               Joseph Campana is the author of “The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and […]

Tabatabai On the Father of Persian Verse

Core lecturer Sassan Tabatabai has released his 2008 book, Father of Songs, as the newly titled Father of Persian Verse. It is an in depth look at the poet Abu ‘Abdollâh’ Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki: Abu ‘Abdollâh’ Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (c. 880 CE-941 CE) was a poet to the Samanid court which ruled much […]