Join us for a reading and conversation with Isaac Jarnot to celebrate Four Lectures (Wave Books, 2024). Four Lectures is the seventh book in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, comprising autobiographical essays that form an intimate, uncompromising, and generous glimpse into a remarkable life in poetry.

Across the lectures, or talks, given between October of 2020 and December of 2021, Jarnot examines what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, to have white privilege, and to write poetry. With colloquial ease and wit, Jarnot investigates the generative tensions at the intersections of traditional and experimental forms, develops relationships between ‘deep gossip’ and ecstatic connectedness, and considers the prophetic tradition in American poetry as inflected through counter-cultural spirituality. Ultimately, Jarnot presents poetry as a calling, asking us to consider the means by which poets can envision a new heaven and a new earth.

Lisa Jarnot (now Isaac Jarnot) was born in Buffalo, NY, and educated at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission (1996), Ring of Fire (2001), Black Dog Songs (2003), Night Scenes (2008), Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992-2012 (2013) and A Princess Magic Presto Spell (2019). He co-edited An Anthology of New (American) Poets (1997), and his biography of San Francisco poet Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, was published by the University of California Press in 2012. He has been a visiting professor at Naropa University, Brooklyn College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, holds a Masters of Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary, is a Ph.D student in theology at Drew University, and is a minister at Safe Haven United Church of Christ.

Reading and Conversation: Isaac Jarnot