October 14, 2021 at 4:00 PM
UNC Asheville (One University Heights) + Zoom
Presented as part of the Faith in Arts Institute
The arts were considered forms of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist practice in ancient China, and mountain landscape played an important part in that practice. Hinton will outline Ch’an insight. Then, starting from that understanding, he will discuss how Ch’an shaped the arts in ancient China, and how it migrated to America in the twentieth century, where it shaped poetry and visual-art in fundamental ways, a process in which John Cage and Black Mountain played a major role.
David Hinton is a writer and translator who has produced a body of work exploring the weave of consciousness and landscape. This exploration is informed throughout by the insights of ancient Chinese culture; and it has primarily taken the form of translation, which he uses as a way to make contemporary poetry that operates outside the limitations of self-identity and the Western intellectual tradition. Over the last decade, Hinton has moved toward writing that is original in a more traditional sense: poetry and lyrical/philosophical essays. Hinton has received numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, the lifetime achievement Thornton Wilder Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many others.