On December 6, from 2-4 p.m. in the Mellon Hodson Room, we at /m invite you to discuss Alice Oswald's Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea. 

About the Reading

Oswald's book is described by the publisher in this way: "A collage of water stories from the Odyssey, reconstructed as a mesmeric and hallucinatory book-length poem by acclaimed poet Alice Oswald.

In Memorial, her unforgettable transformation of the Iliad, Alice Oswald breathed new life into myth. In Nobody, she returns to Homer, this time fixing her gaze on a minor character in the Odyssey—a poet abandoned on a stony island—and the sea that surrounds him. Familiar voices drift in and out of the poem; though there are no proper names, we recognize Helios, Icarus, Alcyone, Philoctetes, Calypso, Clytemnestra, Orpheus, Poseidon, Hermes, and the presiding spirit of Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god.

As with all of Oswald’s work, this is poetry that is made for the human voice, but here the language takes on the qualities of another element: dense, muscular, and liquid. Reading Nobody is like watching the ocean; we slip our earthly moorings and follow the circling shoal of sea voices into a mesh of sound and light and water—fluid, abstract, and moving with the wash of waves."

About the Event

We are offering this seminar in connection with our Fall/Winter Exhibition: "Lost at Sea". This exhibition explores the nature of adventure, loss, grief, and human resiliency. Oswald's work beautifully relates to this thematic matter and, of course, to the St. John's College Program. We can't wait to see the ties you are able to make between what we read, what we see in this exhibition, and what we experience in this poem. 

Details 

To RSVP, send us an email at mitchellartmuseum@sjc.edu

We look forward to seeing you there!

Best,
The /m Team