Online Talk · Morbidity and the Miniature with Poet Elizabeth Metzger
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, May 12, 2025 (DATE PENDING)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
What does a dollhouse have to do with our terror and curiosity about dying and disease? Though the morbid and the miniature may seem unlikely bedfellows, I think we can expand our understanding of the role of death in our culture and our art through a deeper understanding of our human attraction to small beautiful things. In both life and art, we embody this tension: seeking to touch, contain, and manipulate beauty in order to transcend our mortality, while preparing ourselves and others for the inevitable challenges, mysteries, and pains of having a body, being human.
While the connection between the morbid and the miniature is one we may discover and invent, we will also tap into the greater relationship between the material and the metaphysical in poetry and in life. Think: the forensics of heaven and the planet of a cell. We may begin to understand the balance between feeling and making (expressing and constructing) central to the creative act and the life drive itself. This talk will be less static argument and more of a shared incantation, a series of lyric miniatures that stir up our most unspeakable morbidities, mine and yours.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, BOMB, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn with her family. She has received support from Yaddo, PEN America, and Yale University. Metzger teaches poetry at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Poets & Writers. Website: elizabethmetzger.com IG: @nobodytoo2 X: @anelizabeth2
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, May 12, 2025 (DATE PENDING)
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
What does a dollhouse have to do with our terror and curiosity about dying and disease? Though the morbid and the miniature may seem unlikely bedfellows, I think we can expand our understanding of the role of death in our culture and our art through a deeper understanding of our human attraction to small beautiful things. In both life and art, we embody this tension: seeking to touch, contain, and manipulate beauty in order to transcend our mortality, while preparing ourselves and others for the inevitable challenges, mysteries, and pains of having a body, being human.
While the connection between the morbid and the miniature is one we may discover and invent, we will also tap into the greater relationship between the material and the metaphysical in poetry and in life. Think: the forensics of heaven and the planet of a cell. We may begin to understand the balance between feeling and making (expressing and constructing) central to the creative act and the life drive itself. This talk will be less static argument and more of a shared incantation, a series of lyric miniatures that stir up our most unspeakable morbidities, mine and yours.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, BOMB, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn with her family. She has received support from Yaddo, PEN America, and Yale University. Metzger teaches poetry at Columbia University, the 92nd Street Y, and Poets & Writers. Website: elizabethmetzger.com IG: @nobodytoo2 X: @anelizabeth2