Poetry Off the Shelf: Reginald Gibbons
Oidipous Tyrannos: Oedipus the King
Thursday, December 3rd
National Hellenic Museum
801 West Adams Street, 4th Floor
Free admission
Incidental music provided by Fulcrum Point New Music Project led by Stephen Burns.
Reginald Gibbons retells the story of Oedipus, reading the five odes from Oedipus the King, which capture the apprehension, fear, beliefs, and hope of the townspeople of Thebes as the story of Oedipus unfolds in their midst. Filled with sparkling language, intense and surprisingly modern feeling, and myth, the five odes are among the most beautiful poems of antiquity.
Reginald Gibbons’s most recent book of poems is Creatures of a Day (2008), a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. His new translations of Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (2008), won the Soeurette Diehl Fraser translation award from the Texas Institute of Letters. With the late Charles Segal, Gibbons translated two Greek tragedies, Bakkhai and Antigone (2001 and 2003). His new book, Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories, will be published in 2010. His novel Sweetbitter (2003) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He teaches at Northwestern University.
Co-sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Hellenic Museum.
