Date: 8th April 2015

Time: 12:00 pm

Venue: IDS, Building 8, GTU, 75 Kostava Street, Tbilisi

Event: Out of Eden Walk, inspired by Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens

Format: Lecture with a Poetic Meditation

Speaker: Paul Salopek, American journalist and writer, a two-time 

Pulitzer Prize winner

More information on https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2015-09-republic-of-verse/

Poster © Giga Khatiashvili

National Geographic-partnered the Out of Eden Walk - Paul Salopek's 21,000-mile odyssey which is turning into, maybe, a decade-long experiment in slow journalism, brought the two-time Pulitzer Prize laureate, in search of the pathways of the first humans who migrated out of Africa in the Stone Age, into Georgia. Calling the country Republic of Verse and claiming that here in Georgia, poets—not politicians— are national heroes, Paul reflected on his meeting with various people since he arrived in the Georgian town of Akhalkalaki crossing the border from Turkey: wine and kvevri, Bronze Age excavations and  supra, a surgical operation on aorta saving a baby and plastic flowers on a market all fill with contents his fascinating journey. His inspiration may be came after reading the mid-XX century American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens’ (1879-1955) poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which, in its turn, is inspired by the Japanese haiku.