A Late Flowering: Rhina P. Espaillat

• In Event: The Poetic Legacy and Radically Inclusive Vision of Rhina P. Espaillat

Abstract

Poet and independent scholar Alfred Nicol presents “A Late Flowering: Rhina P. Espaillat” to underscore the temporality of the poet’s career trajectory. He explains that with a very few exceptions, the power of even the best poets begins to flag as they reach their eighth and ninth decades. Donald Hall said it well: “As I grew older – collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five – poetry abandoned me.” Against those odds, the beloved Dominican-American poet Rhina P. Espaillat will publish two volumes of new work in this her 86th year, And After All and The Field. What’s more, these new poems include some of the finest she has written in a lifetime dedicated to the art and craft of poetry. The paper will be a close reading of these new poems, with an eye toward how they extend the themes of Espaillat’s poetry: her celebration of bilingualism and community-building as bridges between people, her quarrels with God over matters of justice, and her insistence on the dignity and worth of every person in the human family.

Author

• Alfred P Nicol, Independent Scholar