domingo, outubro 24, 2010

Dodge Poetry Festival Features Pulitzer Winners, U.S. Poet Laureates

Kay Ryan (left) and Carol Adair, who also teaches English at the College of Marin, were married in a ceremony at San Francisco City Hall in 2004. (Provided by Kay Ryan)
Posted by Hannah Elliott

Bill Murray must be beside himself. Next week 24 poets including Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Mark Strand and the brothers Matthew and Michael Dickman will converge in Newark, N.J., for a poetry sampler of the highest order.

The 13th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival is the largest and most famous poetry event in North America. Organizers expect it to attract more than 20,000 people Oct. 7 – 10, plus 4,500 high-school students from 250 schools across the country.

Poets will lead discussions, readings and seminars at multiple locations in the Newark area, including main events at Prudential Hall.

If you don’t know the work of Kay Ryan or Billy Collins, you should. Ryan, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, writes frequently for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She was named to Entertainment Weekly’s “It List” and even has a poem permanently inscribed at New York’s Central Park Zoo.

“Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes,” J. D. McClatchy told the Academy of America Poets. “She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: As intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”

Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and named “Poet of the Year” by Poetry Magazine in 1994, is perhaps most famous for his compilations The Art of Drowning and Questions About Angels. He writes for Harpers, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker.

The Dickman twins are a special treat, especially to younger poetry lovers. They grew up with little intellectual stimulation in a rough neighborhood in Portland, Ore., before Pablo Neruda (and a desire to bag girls) got them interested in poetry. A recent feature in The New Yorker called their work “an illustration of the distinctiveness of the imagination.”

“Michael’s poems are interior, fragmentary, and austere, often stripped down to single-word lines; they seethe with incipient violence,” Rebecca Mead wrote last April. “Matthew’s are effusive, ecstatic, and all-embracing, spilling over with pop-cultural references and exuberant carnality. Reading Michael is like stepping out of an overheated apartment building to be met, unexpectedly, by an exhilaratingly chill gust of wind; reading Matthew is like taking a deep, warm bath with a glass of wine balanced on the soap dish.”

The brothers will speak along with their mentors Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar as part of the “Poets and Mentors” conversation at 2 p.m. this Saturday.

Other featured poets include Pulitzer Prize-winner and McArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient Galway Kinnell (the 83-year-old will read in its entirety his definitive translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which event spokesperson Ilene Antelman compared to “Sir Laurence Olivier reading the Shakespeare soliloquies in his later years”), Amiri Baraka, Kwame Dawes, Bob Hicok, Martin Espada, Dunya Mikhail, and Joseph Millar. Bobby Sanabria & Quarteto Aché, a Latin jazz group, will also perform.

Tickets for the weekend cost $60, or $54 for seniors and $30 for students. A four-day pass costs $100 for general admission. Click here for more details.

Read more:

Bill Murray is Leading a Poetry Revolution
Baby Steps With Bill
Watch: Bill Murray’s Construction Worker Poetry Slam

Follow me on Twitter: @HannahElliott

FONTE: Forbes (blog)

http://blogs.forbes.com/

FOTO: marinij.com

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