Join us for an evening of music and words with poet Robert Pinsky and the great Irish musician, Martin Hayes, and special guest guitarist Kyle Sanna.
Robert Pinsky’s first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism, and such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry’s place in the world.
As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans — of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state — shared their favorite poems. The project’s videos, giving to the American audience for poetry, demonstrate that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a vigorous presence in the American cultural landscape. The project created three anthologies, Americans’ Favorite Poems, An Invitation to Poetry and Poems to Read. Other edited anthologies include Singing School: Learning to Read (and Write) Poetry by Studying with the Masters, a unique combination anthology, personal essay and textbook, and The Book Of Poetry For Hard Times, a gathering of poems that cope with the most extreme human emotions. He also edited The Best of the Best American Poetry, the twenty-fifth volume of the popular Best American Poetry series.
Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative, Pinsky’s poems have earned praise for their wild musical energy and range. He is the author of Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, The Want Bone, First Things to Hand, Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, History of My Heart (winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and At the Foundling Hospital. A career-spanning collection, Selected Poems, was published 2011. His new book is a memoir titled Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet (W.W. Norton, October 20, 2022).
Robert Pinsky’s landmark, best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Pinsky’s prose book, The Life of David, is a lively retelling and examination of the David stories, narrating a wealth of legend as well as scripture. Pinsky also wrote the libretto for Tod Machover’s opera Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant, which premiered in Monaco in fall 2010. In March – June 2013, the Shakespeare Theatre Company performed his newly commissioned adaptation and translation of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein. Pinsky often performs his poems with eminent jazz musicians, in venues ranging from schools and universities to jazz clubs. His CDs PoemJazz and PoemJazz II House Hour, with Grammy-winning pianist Laurence Hobgood, were released by Circumstantial Productions.
Pinsky’s Tanner Lectures at Princeton University were published as Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. His Campbell Lectures at Rice University were published as Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. His popular online MOOC, “The Art of Poetry,” was on the EdX platform in September 2014.
Robert Pinsky is the only member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. For years a regular contributor to PBS’s The NewsHour, he publishes frequently in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review and The Best American Poetry anthologies.
He is also the winner of the PEN/ Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy’s Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. In 2015 Boston University named Robert Pinsky a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, which is the highest honor bestowed on senior faculty members actively involved in research, scholarship, and University civic life, and teaching.
Irish fiddle player Martin Hayes is one of Ireland’s foremost artists, known worldwide for his innovative and soulful interpretations of traditional music. This intimate performance of tunes and conversation provides an opportunity to spend time with a master of the Irish canon.
Martin Hayes’ fiddle playing is rooted in the accent of East County Clare where he grew up playing with his father, the legendary P.J. Hayes, and the Tulla Ceili Band. “The message always coming to me from my father and lots of the finest musicians of County Clare was their idea of musical feeling," says Hayes. "Music had to have feeling or it was nothing."
Hayes’ 25-year musical partnership with American guitarist Dennis Cahill, renowned for its groundbreaking performances, has included three acclaimed recordings, numerous international tours, and a special performance for President Obama. Hayes is also founder of the Martin Hayes Quartet, the Common Ground Ensemble, and the Meteor Award-winning Irish-American supergroup, The Gloaming. He has collaborated with musicians Bill Frisell, Cassandra Wilson, Ricky Skaggs, Jordi Savall, Paul Simon, Sting, Brooklyn Rider, and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble on the Grammy-winning album "Sing Me Home,” as well as many of the leading Irish musicians over the past thirty-five years.
Hayes' many awards include Ireland's Musician of the Year (TG4), Folk Instrumentalist of the Year (BBC), and Person of the Year by the Irish Arts Center and the American Irish Historical Society, both based in New York. He was named Best Folk Instrumentalist of 2018 at the inaugural RTE Radio 1 Folk Awards in Ireland and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Galway. He is Artistic Director of the annual Masters of Tradition festival in Bantry, Co. Cork, and a curator for the Kilkenny Arts Festival. His memoir, Shared Notes, was released in 2021.
Hailed by The New Yorker as a “first-rate, versatile musician”, guitarist Kyle Sanna’s musical practice includes composition, improvisation, the recording studio, coding, and the traditional music of Ireland.
His compositions have been performed at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, the Royal Opera House in Oman, Sydney’s ABC studios, the National Recital Hall in Taipei, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and many points between. WNYC’s New Sounds and Soundcheck host John Schaefer called his music “unconventionally beautiful.”
Kyle Sanna has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, The Knights, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Palaver Strings, Beta Collide, soprano Danielle Birrittella, and flutist Alex Sopp. Festival acceptances include the International Symposium on Electronic Art, The Oregon Bach Festival, and Art Basel Miami Beach. His “ruminative and shape-shifting” (San Francisco Chronicle) work for string quartet, Sequence for Minor White, won First Prize in the 2018 Charlotte New Music Festival Composition Competition. His music appeared on the 2022 PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Holocaust” by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein.
Kyle Sanna has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, Anne-Sofie Von Otter, Martin Hayes, The Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums: 2010’s “Songs of Joy and Peace” and 2016’s “Sing Me Home” with Silkroad. His arrangements have appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR’s Performance Today, and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, In a Circle, and Naïve labels.
In addition to his composing and arranging, Sanna performs regularly as an improvising guitarist with Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand and Ground Patrol, and performs music based in the Irish tradition with the Seamus Egan Project, Martin Hayes and the Common Ground Ensemble, Maeve Gilchrist, and a duo with violinist Dana Lyn. He is equally at home in the recording studio as on the stage, and has produced nine full-length albums by various artists.
Kyle Sanna studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.