The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics is offered annually by a prominent poet. Past lectures have been given by Elizabeth Alexander, Richard Blanco, Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Jane Hirshfield, Susan Howe, Adrian Matejka, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Claudia Rankine, and Patricia Smith.
On Thursday, May 29, at 4 p.m. PDT / 7 p.m. EDT, acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar will deliver the 2025 Blaney Lecture, “Poetry and Spirituality."
Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. In discussing poems across the centuries—from “Hymn to Inanna” to Szymborska—Akbar reminds us that language has history, density, complexity. Such poetry, Akbar says, becomes a potent antidote against an empire that would use “the raw overwhelm of meaningless language” to cudgel us into inaction.
Kaveh Akbar is the author of two poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017). He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. Akbar's first novel, Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), was a New York Times Bestseller.
This virtual event is free to attend with registration. Closed captioning will be provided.
The Academy of American Poets' programs are made possible in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Past Blaney Lectures
Jane Hirshfield, Making the Invisible Visible: Some Thoughts on Poetry & Science, 2024
Patricia Smith, The Scrawny Little Black Girl with the Hasty Pigtails Sounds Out ‘Anemone,’ 2023
Paisley Rekdal, Beyond Empathy, Beyond the Archive: Notes on Poetic Representation, 2022
Adrian Matejka, Let’s Stay Together: Notes About Black Poetry & Community, 2020 - 2021
Terrance Hayes, Survey of an American Century, 2019
Alicia Ostriker, Containing Multitude: Poetry and the City, 2018
Claudia Rankine, 2017
Sharon Olds, Favorite Moments in Poems from Chaucer to Clifton, 2016
Joy Harjo, Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigeneous Poetry & Poets, 2015
Richard Blanco, On Becoming A Presidential Inaugural Poet, 2014
Carolyn Forché, Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness, 2013
Elizabeth Alexander, Rethinking Lucille Clifton, 2012
Susan Howe, The Whispered Rush, Telepathy of Archives, 2011
Anne Carson, 2010