Three writers journey with Rainer Maria Rilke.

“Here is the time of what is sayable, here its home. / Speak and bear witness. More than ever, / things we experience fall asunder, and / what forcibly replaces them is an acting without vision.”

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, FROM THE EIGHTH OF THE DUINO ELEGIES

Join Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama and award-winning author Barbara Mahany for a conversation with Mark S. Burrows about Rilke’s poems and writings that remind them of what it means to “bear witness”—to life in those “dark hours” we face when we experience things “falling asunder.” Can such times call us, with Rilke, to embrace “a second life, timeless and wide”? Each of these writers will read and talk about selected poems of Rilke’s that have challenged or inspired them, offering what the poet described as “words that still ripen in the silences.”

Learn more about these poets here.

Right: Portrait of Rilke by Leonid Pasternak