The Wallace Stevens Walk: A Virtual Tour (NWL)

Join Jim Finnegan as he leads a virtual tour following the 13 stones that trace a 2.4 mile course of Wallace Stevens’ pedestrian commute. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was one of America’s greatest poets, and he spent most of his adult life living and working in the city of Hartford, Connecticut. Each of the thirteen stones running from The Hartford’s historic insurance company building, where Stevens worked, to Stevens’ former home on Westerly Terrace is inscribed with a section from Stevens’ most famous poem: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird." While we take the walk together ‘virtually’, we’ll enjoy a close reading of the poem, as well as hear some anecdotes from Wallace Stevens’ life. We’ll learn about how the Wallace Stevens Walk came to be the interactive landmark that it is, with the hope that more people will be inspired to take the actual Wallace Stevens Walk.

James Finnegan has published poems in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in the anthologies: Good Poems: American Places edited by Garrison Keillor; Laureates of Connecticut; Shadows of Unfinished Things; Imagining Vesalius; Waking Up to the Earth; and Of Hartford in Many Lights. For a decade he served as president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens. He served as the third Poet Laureate of West Hartford, CT. 

Registration required. Registration opens one month before the program at 7:00pm.