Janice Townley Moore celebrates Poetry Month at Emory University

I attended a conference called “A Fine Excess,” which was a celebration of poetry at Emory University on April 2-4. It coincided with the opening of an exhibit in the Emory Library’s Shattan Gallery of the Danowski Collection of books of poetry in English. This collection includes 75,000 books collected by Raymond Danowski and now housed at Emory. The Shattan Gallery had a fine exhibit of a small portion of these, such as first published books by Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, the original Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, a volume of Sylvia Plath poems owned by Anne Sexton, a very early poem of Seamus Heaney in a small literary magazine, the early printed poem of T.S Eliot’s famous “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” inscribed to Emily Hale, an American girlfriend, and much, much more.
The conference celebrated three former United States poet laureates with readings and personal interviews during the several days. They were S. D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur. Other award winning poets also did readings and signed their books for the large and enthusiastic crowd attending.