October 3, 2025 | By Helen Wagner (A26)

On a recent Saturday afternoon at St. John’s College Annapolis, as the late summer sun shone above the shouts of an intramural handball game, a motley group of poetry lovers opted to stay inside, gathering in the Mellon Hall Conversation Room to listen to prizewinning poet Mary Jo Bang.

The room was packed with students, tutors, and Annapolitans. A lone midshipman sat by the door, white hat off, open notebook in hand. Bang stood at the front. A dainty woman in a black dress, she barely cleared the podium before her. She read from one of her poems: “…Just like you, I feel my way / forward, letting the back of my hand brush against the matte wall as I watch / the chiaroscuro movie of my mind.”

Bang’s September 2025 reading was part of a community series called Poets in the Conversation Room, held monthly at the St. John’s Annapolis campus and live-streamed to the college’s YouTube channel to viewers at the college’s Santa Fe campus and beyond. In partnership with Annapolis Home Magazine and Maryland’s tenth poet laureate Grace Cavalieri, the college hosts nationally recognized poets for monthly readings and discussions on Saturday afternoons. At a Great Books college, where most of the authors have been dead for hundreds of years, this series gives the community a chance to engage with contemporary authors.

Now entering its second year, Cavalieri launched the series in 2024 with Kymberly Taylor, editor of Annapolis Home Magazine. They wanted to host poetry readings in Annapolis but didn’t have a location. “We needed a locus,” Cavalieri says. “A temple for the flame. We needed to find a room in an honored house.”

St. John’s College, known for promoting the life of the mind in Annapolis and beyond, was the perfect venue. “Everybody knows this campus,” Taylor says. “Everybody walks by College Avenue and looks at the beautiful green and wonders what really goes on here.” The Poets series, which is free and open to the public, invites these curious neighbors to come find out for themselves.

“[St. John’s] is the place of thinking,” adds Cavalieri, whose relationship with the college was deepened through a longtime friendship with the late Annapolis tutor emerita, dean, and honorary alumna Eva Brann, “and the place of inquiry, and poetry asks the biggest questions of all. This is a place where they need to be discussed.”;

Initially funded by grants provided by the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts Council of Anne Arundel County, these ongoing events occur one Saturday of each month, from 2-4 p.m. Their format includes a 40-minute poetry reading, followed by an interactive discussion with the audience.

Poets in the Conversation Room’s inaugural year brought some of the nation’s top poets to St. John’s, including Los Angeles Times Book Prize recipient Remica Bingham-Risher. The campus will welcome additional luminaries over the next several months, with Bang’s visit officially kicking off the season’s literary lineup.

Currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Bang is the nationally recognized author of nine poetry books, including 2023’s A Film in Which I Play Everyone—a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award—and 2007’s Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Bang also knows what it’s like being immersed in the Great Books: she’s translated all three works of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with her version of Paradiso released this past year. From this, she shares a kinship with St. John’s students, who, as sophomores, read the poem’s entirety.

Bang’s translation brings a lively touch to Dante’s work and demonstrates the modern relevance of the 700-year-old poem. “I wanted to create a translation that was in the vernacular, because Dante wrote in the vernacular,” she says. “Dante wanted it to have the warmth of the language we use with our family, friends, and beloveds. He wanted everyone to read this poem because he was talking about things that were urgent to him: about political things, about moral things. And he wanted everyone who could read to be able to read it.” These words ring true at St. John’s, where Great Books, many of them completed in the distant past, are still read and discussed with the warmth of living language.

Other notable poets appear alongside Dante in the St. John’s Program: for example, first-years read Homer, Sappho, and Sophocles; sophomores study Shakespeare and Lucretius; juniors read Milton; and seniors translate Baudelaire in the language tutorial. By inviting contemporary poets to the Conversation Room, Cavalieri and Taylor are “presenting not only a reading, but a continuum of human thought,” Cavalieri reflects. “These poets are standing on the shoulders of their ancestors,” providing variations on the same universal themes explored for millennia. Take, for example, Bang’s poem, “Hanging the Curtain,” which she read out loud in the Conversation Room and references “the zoo / of my petty vices.” Her words echo Baudelaire’s poem “Au Lecteur,” which contains the line “the infamous menagerie of our vices.”

Poets in the Conversation Room will continue at St. John’s through May 2026, thanks to financial support from Frank Rowsome, husband of the late St. John’s tutor emerita Nancy Buchenauer. “We have the top poets in America coming,” Cavalieri says. The next reading will take place on Saturday, October 18, in the Mellon Conversation Room, featuring St. John’s alumna poet Jehanne Dubrow (A97). As for participating poets who hadn’t attended or weren’t previously familiar with St. John’s College, they, like their audience members, get to engage in a journey of mutual exploration.

“I think it’s remarkable that there still exists a college such as St. John’s, where people devote themselves for four years to reading the Great Books, because they’re not read nearly as often as they should be,” Bang says. “I hope the students enjoy immersing themselves in those works. I certainly have. It took me 20 years to translate [the Divine Comedy], and I’m sure it changed my brain and my life.”

Plus, Cavalieri observes, ”All the big philosophical questions are present in a poem.” It’s safe to say, then, that St. John’s College is a worthy home for poetry.

Past and upcoming Poets in the Conversation Room events can be viewed on the college’s YouTube channel.

Upcoming 2025-26 Events:

October 18: Jehanne Dubrow

November 15: David Gewanter

December 6: Avideh Shashaani and Zeina Azzam

January 17: Askold Melnyczuk

February 21: Michael Gushue and Kim Roberts

March 21: Bob Hicok

April 25: Tim Seibles

May 2: Greg Orr