USC Poetry Reading | Jasper Johns: A Tour of the Imagination

Organized by award-winning poet Carol Muske-Dukes, professor of English at the University of Southern California, 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 poetry that they have crafted. The reading will be the consummation of an ongoing collaborative process between image and word; these poets will have earlier chosen one work of art from Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’, then spent hours “in conversation” with their artwork selection to compose their poems. 

STUDENT + Jasper Johns Artworks

• Sara Fetherolf: Numbers, 2007
• Stephanie Horvath: Catenary (Jacob's Ladder), 1999
• Katharine Ogle: Target, 1961
• Catherine Pond: Voice 2, 1982
• Essy Stone: In memory of my feelings, Frank O'Hara, 1961
• Katrin Tschirgi: Map, 1962
• Maggie Woodward: Green Angel, 1990

The evening's final reading will be an ensemble effort in the form of a “crown of sonnets” in response to Bridge, 1997.

Please note the audience will be standing throughout the evening and walking short distances inside the Jasper Johns galleries. The event is wheelchair accessible. No seating is available in the museum galleries.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZER

Carol Muske-Dukes is professor of English at the University of Southern California and a former Poet Laureate of California. Her ninth books of poems, Blue Rose, is forthcoming from Penguin/Random House in April, 2018, and her poetry collection, Sparrow (Random House, 2003), was a National Book Award finalist. Muske-Dukes’ books (which include novels, essay collections and co-edited anthologies) have been New York Times Most Notable selections, and she 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, APRand 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.