The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2017

David Young has always looked to the natural world as both location for his poetry, and as a way to speak to other poets he has translated, such as Tu Fu and Pablo Neruda, or contemporaries such as Charles Wright. His daughter Margaret studied poetry and bioregionalism at U.C. Davis, and her writing has also been rooted in place and nature. While the elder Young remained in the Oberlin, Ohio of his long career, years of living in small towns and cities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, and Massachusetts have made the younger Young take a different spin on the family business. In this unprecedented dialogue between generations, each poet will use several of the other’s works to lead a discussion of what it means to be a poet of place in the anthropocene.