Poetry has always been at the center of the friendship between Alan Shapiro and Jonathan Farmer. They met when Farmer took a poetry class from Shapiro at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in the early days they often argued about poetry. Today they agree more often but still have a lot to discuss with one another in their regular meetups.
They both just released new books: Shapiro published a new work of poetry called “Against Translation” (University of Chicago Press/2019), and Farmer’s new book “That Peculiar Affirmative: On The Social Life of Poems” (Texas A&M University Press/2019) takes a critical look at poetry.
Host Frank Stasio talk to these two poets about their relationship, their new books and the social act of writing poetry. Shapiro is a poet and a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Farmer is the editor-in-chief and poetry editor of At Length magazine.
The two will be at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill on Tuesday, April 2 at 7 p.m.