poetry reading

Tag: poetry reading

Award-winning Poet Cole Swensen Gives Reading at Lawrence University

Cole Swensen, one of the most intellectually curious experimental poets writing today, will conduct a reading Thursday, March 2 at 8 p.m. in the Lawrence University Wriston Art Center auditorium. A reception and book signing will follow the reading. Prior to the reading, Swensen will discuss her work in an open forum at 4:30 p.m. in Main Hall, Room 105. Both events are free and open to the public.

The author of 10 books of poetry, Swensen’s most recent, “The Book of a Hundred Hands,” (2005) is a collection of poems in which she explores the expression of human emotion through the position and musculature of the hand, covering the spectrum of possibilities, from sign language to shadow puppets.

Swensen’s 2004 collection, “Goest,” which was loosely based on John Beckmann’s 19th century text “A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins,” celebrates inventiveness, using facts as “diving boards for pools of rhyme and pun, distortion and song.” It was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award in the poetry category.

She also has earned two Pushcart Prizes, which honors distinguished short stories, essays and poetry that are first published by small press houses. Her poetry collection “Try” received the 1998 Iowa Poetry Prize and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award.

“Swensen’s work rewards the attentive and imaginative reader both with its breadth of focus and with its lyrical language,” said Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English, who is organizing the poet’s appearance.

In addition to writing poetry, Swensen is also a translator of contemporary French poetry, prose and art criticism. Her translation of Jean Frémon’s “Island of the Dead” earned her the PEN American Center Award for Translation.

A native of California who has lived in London, Denver, Washington, D.C. and most recently, Paris, where she maintains a part-time residency, Swensen began her career as a teacher at an alternative high school. She joined the faculty at the University of Denver in 1996 and also has taught at Grinnell College and the Naropa Institute. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Swensen earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree at San Francisco State University and has undertaken doctoral studies at the University of California.

Swensen’s appearance is supported by the Mia T. Paul Poetry Fund. Established in 1998, the endowed fund brings distinguished poets to campus for public readings and to work with students on writing poetry and verse.

Poet Gillian Conoley Gives Reading at Lawrence University

Lawrence University will host a poetry reading for award-winning California poet Gillian Conoley Thursday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m. in Science Hall 102. A reception and book signing will follow the reading, which is free and open to the public.

The author of six books of poetry, Conoley’s latest collection of poems, “Profane Halo,” was released earlier this month. Post-allegorical, post-apocalyptic and post-Christian, “Profane Halo” continues Conoley’s earlier exploration of questions of grace and redemption, language and being and death in life.

Other collections of Conoley’s work include 2001’s “Lovers in the Used World,” a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, “Tall Stranger,” which was nominated for the 1991 National Book Critics’ Circle Award, “Beckon” (1996) and “Some Gangster Pain,” which earned her co-winner honors of the 1987 Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award. Her chapbook, “Fatherless Afternoon,” also was published earlier this year.

“Gillian Conoley’s work has something to offer every reader,” said Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English. “Her early poems are narrative in structure and form but in her two most recent collections, she has pushed in an increasingly innovative direction, drawing on the discourses of film, television, philosophy and politics.

“Her most recent collection, ‘Profane Halo,’ is a kind of meditation on American identity in the aftermath of  September 11th,” Barrett added. “In her syntactic and linguistic experiments, Conoley reaches for a language that can evoke the horrors of that event and the challenges of living with a burdened memory.”

The founder and editor of “Volt,” an influential poetry journal, Conoley was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review in 2000 and has been the recipient of several Pushcart Prizes, which honors distinguished short stories, essays and poetry that are first published by small press houses.

Conoley is a professor of English and poet-in-residence at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif. She has also taught as a visiting poet at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College and Tulane University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at Southern Methodist University and a master of fine arts degree in poetry at the University of Massachusetts.

Conoley’s appearance is supported by the Mia T. Paul Poetry Fund. Established in 1998, the endowed fund brings distinguished poets to campus for public readings and to work with students on writing poetry and verse.

Lawrence University Alumnus, Poet William Fuller Gives Reading

Poet William Fuller, a 1975 Lawrence University graduate, shares some of his work in a reading Thursday, Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m. in the Milwaukee Downer Room of the Seeley G. Mudd Library. A reception and book signing will follow the reading, which is free and open to the public.

Fuller, whose work leans toward the experimental, has produced an impressive body of work, including four books and five chapbooks. His first collection of poems, “byt,” was published in 1989, but it was 1993’s “The Sugar Borders” that earned him widespread recognition. “Aether” was released five years later and his fourth book, “Sadly,” was published in 2003. The chapbook “Avoid Activity” also was released in 2003. His newest collection of poems, “Watchword,” is slated for publication next year.

“William Fuller writes poems which stage collisions of different kinds of diction — literary, philosophical, corporate and colloquial,” said Lawrence Univesity assistant professor of English Faith Barrett, who helped arrange Fuller’s visit. “Responding to the project of the language poets, his work is at times playful, at times elegiac, but always committed to an exploration of the limits and the powers of lyric voice.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in English from Lawrence, Fuller attended the University of Virginia, earning his Ph.D. in English in 1983. In addition to writing poetry, Fuller is senior vice president and chief fiduciary officer in the Trust Department of Chicago’s Northern Trust Company.

Fuller’s appearance is supported by the Mia T. Paul Poetry Fund. Established in 1998, the endowed fund brings distinguished poets to campus for public readings and to work with students on writing poetry and verse.

“Black Mountain Poet” Robert Creeley Gives Reading at Lawrence University

Robert Creeley, whose unique style featuring concise and emotionally powerful verse has inspired generations of poets, shares his work in a reading at Lawrence University.

Creeley will give a reading of some of his poems Thursday, Jan, 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Harper Hall in the Lawrence Music-Drama Center. A reception and book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Raised on a farm in West Acton, Mass., Creeley, 78, has produced an impressive body of work, including nearly 60 published volumes of his poems, a novel and numerous short stories and essays. His first published poem, “Le Fou,” appeared in 1952, but it was 1962’s “For Love: Poems 1950-1960,” a collection of verse in which he explored human relationships and common day events, themes that would become his hallmark, that earned him widespread acclaim.

Among his most recent works is a collection of poems entitled “If I Were Writing This,” (2003) “Just in Time” (2001) and “Life and Death” (2000), in which he examines his own mortality.

Early in his career, Creeley was best known for his association with the “Black Mountain Poets”” The talented group of writers — Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Ed Dorn and Denise Levertov among them — all had some connection with the experimental North Carolina institution Black Mountain College, which attracted some of the most innovative writers and artists of the 1950s. It was during this period Creeley developed the tenet “form is never more than an extension of content” that would remain central to much of his work throughout his career.

“Creeley is the kind of poet that everyone in the highly-factionalized world of poets and poetry magazines appreciates,” said Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English at Lawrence, who is coordinating Creeley’s visit. “His work appeals to both experimental and mainstream writers and is widely read in university classes. It is a real coup for us to get a poet of his stature to come and share his work.”

Creeley attended Harvard University, but his education was interrupted by World War II. He left school to serve as an ambulance driver in Burma for the American Field Service. After the war, he returned to Harvard, but dropped out during the last semester of his senior year. He eventually earned his bachelor’s degree at Black Mountain College, where he also later taught and served as editor of the literary journal “The Black Mountain Review.”

Creeley’s work has earned him numerous prestigious awards, including two Guggenheim fellowships, both the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal and the Shelley Memorial Award and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. In 1987 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and served as New York State Poet from 1989-91.

After teaching stints at the University of New Mexico, the University of British Columbia and San Francisco State University, Creeley joined the English department at the State University of New York – Buffalo in 1967, where he taught until 2003. He currently serves as a distinguished professor in English for the graduate program in creative writing at Brown University.

Creeley’s appearance is supported by the Mia T. Paul Poetry Fund. Established in 1998, the endowed fund brings distinguished poets to campus for public readings and to work with students on writing poetry and verse.