Watch Father Ernesto Cardenal, an acclaimed poet and liberation theologian, giving a reading of his poetry May 1.

Cardenal recited poems from his recent collection The Origin of Species and Other Poems in Benton Chapel on the Vanderbilt campus.

Cardenal, acknowledged as one of Latin America’s greatest living poets, is the author of more than 35 books. He studied with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1965. He lives in Nicaragua, where he is vice president of Casa de los Tres Mundos, a literary and cultural organization.

“Cardenal’s poetry is impure, defiantly, in that it unites political ugliness and the beauty of the imaginative vision,” poet Robert Bly has said.

The reading is sponsored by Vanderbilt University Divinity School.