The Beloved Poem: Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
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Poetry at Bennington—Spring 2023
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices? This craft talk will examine how Robert Hayden constructed this unforgettable poem, “Those Winter Sundays,” and how the poem patterns language not simply to express but to enact its content. This craft talk will also examine how patterned language—when exacted very carefully and cleverly—can imagine for survivors of private and public trauma new ways to speak truth to power through form, ambiguity, and lyric indirection.
Paul Tran is the author of All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022), a poetry collection that investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. The recipient of a Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Tran is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.