Reading and performance: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, with Aaron Angello, Sommer Browning, and others! Friday, May 13, 2022, 7pm
Join us on Friday, May 13, 2022, at 7pm as we parse and perform William Shakespeares Sonnet 29, as a way to celebrate the recent publication of Aaron Angello’s The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications, a book that uses Sonnet 29 as a portal for writing practice. With readings by Aaron Angelo, Sommer Browning, and Kathy Fish. Video by KJ Holmes and lightning talk by Shakespeare scholar Katherine Eggert! Here’s the sonnet!
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Aaron Angello is a poet, playwright, and essayist from the Rocky Mountains who lives and feels remarkably out of place in the charming, but very Eastern, town of Frederick, Maryland. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder, and he currently teaches writing and theater at Hood College. Visit his website at here.
Sommer Browning is a poet and writer living in Denver. Her third collection of poetry is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). Her poetry and art writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Southwest Contemporary, Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere.
Kathy Fish’s writings have been widely published and reprinted, most recently in The Norton Reader, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Small Fictions (2016, ’17, ’18, ’20), Advanced Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury) and various other journals, textbooks, and anthologies.
K.J. Holmes is an independent dance artist, singer, poet, actor and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York.
Katherine Eggert is a scholar of English Renaissance literature and culture, ranging across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and across the literary genres of drama, poetry, and prose. She has also published on Shakespeare on film. Lately, she has been interested in literature and early modern science, especially questions of epistemology and how we manage to know some things and not know others. A recipient of year-long fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Professor Eggert has served as chair of the Department of English (2004-2010) and as the Vice President (2006-2007) and President (2008-2009) of the International Spenser Society, and she is currently Senior Vice Provost and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Planning and Assessment. Her current research project is a book on Renaissance happiness.