D’Angelo Lecture: Erica Hunt, “lines set afloat toward hope”

I had been looking forward to Monday April 14 ever since we finalized the appointment of Erica Hunt as the English Department’s honorary D’Angelo Chair for spring 2025. Erica is a distinguished poet and writer who has been with us at St. John’s for the entire spring semester, teaching a Creative Writing Workshop to some very lucky students and joining the life of the department. This public lecture was the crowning event of her time in Queens.

Before she read, Dr. Teresa Delgado, Dean of St John’s College, introduced the occasion with an impassioned defense of the humanities in a time of turmoil and stress. Her stark celebration of the kinds of truth and faith that only the arts and humanities can provide set the tone for the afternoon. I followed with an introduction of Erica Hunt as a poet and an artist. I paid special attention to how poetry creates enables things to change in the world —

poetry creates opportunities for change. That’s the heart of the matter, the key thing. Poetry invites change, facilitates change, is change

Erica read from her great recent collection of old and newer poems, Jump the Clock (2020), and then turned to some newer poems in progress, including a series about the storyteller from the 1001 Nights, Scheherazade, her audience and antagonist “the Boss,” and a third character, a journalist who tries to be objective in the face of tyranny and violence.

The show-stopping ending was a new poem that emerges from her current fascination with murmurations, the complex and dynamic shapes that starlings exhibit. She describes seeing a flock of starlings assume these forms over a lake on a cloudy day. Further research has shown her that the forms are not hierarchical but emerge from local communication between “one or five or seven” birds in close proximity to each other.

In order to share with us these complex and changing patterns, she projected images of starlings in the process of murmuration onto screens set up around the room. Using eight separate projects – many of them borrowed from the Art History department and the Art Gallery on campus – she immersed us inside an electronic murmuration while we listened to her last poem. Through some techno-wizardry that I don’t pretend to understand, at a certain point the birds in the images became words.

The connection between birdsong and human poetry is ancient and enduring. Each spring we hear in the trills and calls of songbirds a mysterious music. At St John’s we’ve been fortunate to have an eloquent explorer of that human and more-than-human music among us this spring semester.