Gregory Pardlo teaches at George Washington University. His debut collection, Totem, won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. His poetry is formal, precise, and theatrical in its tendency to inhabit the voices of others. If his poetry were a band, it would be Pink Floyd, fronted by Andre 3000. A lifelong guitar player, Pardlo never loses the music in the words. An excerpt from "Soundtrack":

Suppose, for instance, our taste for / harmony is just a groping after patterns. Rapture of ten / million monkeys tattooing the keys of their / typewriters symphonically like the cast of Stomp. / Must I organize life according to an alphabet / of clicks and grunts? What use is an anniversary? / What makes the sentence a complete thought and why / would anyone want one?

Ed Skoog's poetry is formal, too, but if Pardlo's wearing a white tuxedo, Skoog's in a three-piecer with a tire iron hidden under the sportcoat. His debut collection, Mister Skylight, came out only last year from Copper Canyon Press, but it's almost impossible to find someone in the poetry world who doesn't know Ed personally or hasn't read (and loved) his starkly-rendered portraits of regular people caught up in this world's ongoing disaster. As he says in the poem "Recent Changes at Cantor's Deli":

I’m the dredge flopping for tar from the pits. / Click. I am a kind of David Bowie / in the Amoeba Records everything’s-a-dollar bin.

Pardlo and Skoog will read poems and then participate in a brief Q&A about their work.