The UNC Slavic Languages and Literature Department will be holding a Commemorative Celebration and Poetry Reading Honoring Czeslaw Milosz on Thursday October 6 at 7:30 pm..

Back in 1993, I went to Milosz’s home in Berkeley, California and video taped him reading poems in Polish and in English. The audio from that session is on the Internet Poetry Archive. But tomorrow night, thanks to help from Max Gustashaw, I’ll be showing the video for the first time. Eventually we’ll add the video to the Internet Poetry Archive.

It’s not that often that you get to meet someone like Czeslaw Milosz. His poetry over the years and changes is wonderful, clear and strong in a dialectic with his tendencies to be complex and direct, almost lewd yet religious, attracted to the world but spiritually driven, child-like yet wise, formal but also free in any form. His prose work, The Captive Mind, is the best book on totalitarian manipulation of intellectuals written.