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“And as to me, I know nothing else but miracles.”

Upcoming Events

“Whitman’s Long Island: Then & Now” – Ecopoet & Open Mic

Program 2 in WWBA 2024 Series – Whitman’s Long Island: Then & Now
Ecopoet & Open Mic – Sunday, June 9, 4 -5:30PM
Ecopoet Maya C Popa reads her poems that address the effects of climate change. WWBA Trustee Mark Nuccio reads Whitman’s ecopoetry and essays. Ecopoetry uses language to deepen a sense of nature’s presence in our lives. WWBA invites the community to join an open mic with their environmentally inspired poetry following the presentation. Nature poetry often takes its themes from the so-called “natural world” as though it were separate from the human world. Ecopoetry is also poetry with a strong natural/ecological emphasis or message. The term “ecopoetry” is derived from an ideological perspective when the poet does not view the “other” as “oppositional,” but rather the poet views “difference” as “relational.” Thus, poets and their Nature topics “relate” to each other, and this makes an “ecosystem.” When writers or poets hold this relational stance to nature, they are considered Ecopoets.  Today, Ecopoets are serving witness to climate change while bringing attention to important environmental issues and advocating for preservation and conservation. Our Ecopoetry programs aim to teach the community to feel “relational” to the “environment,” and thus relational to climate issues which regulate the environment.

This event is FREE and held in person.

About WWBA 2024 Series – Whitman’s Long Island: Then & Now
Our 2024 Series compares Whitman’s literary celebrations of his native Long Island environment circa 1824 with current conservational commentaries two hundred years later in 2024. Sessions open with a poem or essay by ecopoet Walt Whitman followed by a community conversation led by notable Long Island environmentalists. Programs focus on Environmental Justice issues for Long Island communities which include access to clean water, pollution free environment, and a financially accessible food supply.  Walt Whitman heralded the beauty of Long Island and its topological characteristics of the fields, forests, creeks, wetlands, bays, sound and ocean from Brooklyn to Montauk Point. His writings are infused with this environment. Our Series illuminates the agrarian and aquatic-based society in which he was born and which he heralded in his writings, such as “Leaves of Grass” and other publications.

 

 


 

Maya C. Popa is a Romanian-American poet and, most recently, the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Levis reading prize from VCU. “They are Building a Hospital” from the collection appeared on the On Being podcast hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuoma. Her first full-length collection, American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She is also the author of two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook Series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave and The Bees Have Been Canceled, which was a PBS Summer Choice.

About American FaithDeborah Landau says, “Maya Popa’s clear-eyed lyrics register with steady power a spectrum of 21st century violences. In poems that take on the devastating pressure of climate change, gun violence, and our threatened democracy, Popa uses her gift to grieve and in grieving forge song. Revelatory yet emphatically unsentimental, Popa’s unflinching distillations illuminate the facets of our broken world; there is much wisdom here, and grace, and heart.” And of her most recent collection, Kaveh Akbar observes, “I am stuck in an almost life, / in an almost time,’ Maya C. Popa writes in the titular poem from Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. Suspended in the uncanny amber of such a time, such a place, we readers encounter ourselves, endlessly reprocessing our own pasts and worrying our futures as the vast roiling moment corrodes both. Still, Popa insists upon, if not hope exactly, then a world beyond the hopelessness this one inspires: ‘There are still things that cannot be imagined.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is a complex, searching collection, one I will be returning to for years.”

In 2021, Popa she was commissioned by The United Nations to write a poem and deliver the opening remarks for the International Day of the Girl Conference. Her poetry was featured on a Louis Vuitton trunk for the Visionaries 200-Year Anniversary campaign. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, was named a 2023 Substack Featured Publication. Popa is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, the Hippocrates Society in London, and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She is director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of a department bursary for exceptional merit. She has been invited to speak on the role of wonder in poetry at Oxford University and elsewhere.

 


 

Mark Nuccio, WWBA Trustee, Artist, Poet, and Community Activist: Primary Team Leader. Nuccio studied painting and history with post-grad studies in Product Design and Engineering. He is the founder of Design Edge Group which develops and markets toys and games. Three of his woodcut prints, including “Walt Whitman,” reside at the Library of Congress. Nuccio has written over 25 published articles on the environmental challenges of Long Island and its surrounding waters. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, and recently published Mary E and all that Jazz. Mark is a musician who is knowledgeable about traditional folk music, jazz, and blues, and is fluent in guitar, banjo, and harmonica. He taught art classes in the Taylor Street projects in Brooklyn, NY to inner city senior adults, made wood cuts supporting Caesar Chavez and MLK, and created paintings devoted to the culture of the Montaukette Indians and former slaves from the east end of Long Island. He is active in fishing and boating organizations. 

 


 

This program is made possible with funds from Humanities New York, Poets & Writers, NY State Parks and Suffolk County and  funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and administered by The Huntington Arts Council and supported by New York State Parks and Suffolk County.

Date: Sunday, June 9, 2024
Start Time: 4:00 pm EST

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Walt Whitman Birthplace Association
246 Old Walt Whitman Road
Huntington Station, NY 11746

Membership

Members Receive:

  • Free admission to the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site and Interpretive Center
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  • 10% discounts on museum space rentals for private events

2023 Student Poetry Contest