Seattle Arts & Lectures' annual Poetry Series features readings, on-stage interviews, and book signings by four major poets. Seattle Arts & Lectures is pleased to announce that this year's series will move to a new home at INTIMAN Theatre.

The 2005 Poetry Series featured:

Kay Ryan: Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Like a wonder cabinet, Kay Ryan's magnificently compressed poems open to disclose the world's myriad curiosities. The winner of the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Ryan has been likened to Emily Dickinson for the wit, elegant precision, and intellectual investigation that she shares with her predecessor. The author of five collections of poetry, Ryan's dense, epigrammatic poems "resemble pastilles," David Yezzi wrote in Poetry, "lemon drops hard enough to cut your lip on. The sweetness derives from their gently musical, amusing surfaces, the tang from a rueful world view."

RyanÕs poetry both delights and instructs—not only the reader, but also the writer herself. "I am always a student of poetry," Ryan says, "and in it I find a rest that I don't find anywhere else, whether writing my own or reading the masters. And by rest I mean not quiescence or stop, but release. What poetry does is put more oxygen into the atmosphere. Poetry makes it easier to breathe." A Guggenheim fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, Ryan lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

"Ryan is remarkably dexterous at slating the poetic light upon common places to disclose previously unknown contours."—Booklist

Ted Kooser: Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Nearly twenty years ago, Georgia Review called Ted Kooser "an authentic poet of the American people." This year, that description truly came to pass as Kooser was named Poet Laureate of the United States, the first from the Plains States. Kooser, who was born in Iowa and now lives in Nebraska, is a retired insurance executive who, for thirty-five years, rose at 4:30 in the morning to write before work. The result was ten books of poetry that have consistently and quietly examined the vivid details of everyday life in the Midwest. What begin as precise particulars, however, are transformed by poem's-end into insightful metaphors that resonate beyond. "The setting may be rural America," the Christian Science Monitor wrote, "but the scene is universal."

Kooser's most recent book, Delights and Shadows (2004), features the clear, taut poems he strives for—and has come to be lauded for. "Poetry," he says, "can do some remarkable things for people if they have access to it." The recipient of a NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, Kooser is currently a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

"Kooser documents the dignities, habits, and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."—Poetry

W.S. Merwin: Monday, March 28, 2005

In a career spanning six decades, Pulitzer Prize-winner W.S. Merwin—poet, translator, and environmental activist—has become one of the most prolific, most read, and most honored writers of the century. His first book of poems, A Mask for Janus (1952), was selected by W.H. Auden for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets. In all, Merwin has written more than fifteen books of poetry, several volumes of prose, and numerous works of translation. He is known for his virtuosic range of style, from formal to experimental, and of subject, from classical myth to contemporary society. Edward Hirsch, writing in the New York Times, called Merwin "a master of erasures and negations, a visionary of discomfort and reproof, the Samuel Beckett of postwar American poetry."

A Guggenheim fellow and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Merwin has been awarded almost every major prize in American poetry and translation, including the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, and the 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Merwin has lived in many parts of the world, most recently in Haiku, Hawaii.

"A poet who engages the underground stream of our lives at depths that only two or three living poets can match."—Boston Sunday Globe

Maxine Kumin: Monday, April 11, 2005

Maxine Kumin "finds a way to talk to wildness." In thirteen books of poetry and several volumes of prose, the poet has mined the inner and outer landscapes of life in rural New Hampshire to produce unflinching, elegiac, and meticulous portraits that expose the wonder in the seemingly ordinary. This keenly-wrought verse garnered Kumin the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her fourth book of poetry, Up Country: Poems of New England (1972). Kumin translates the transience of life and dense natural world into poems characterized by matter-of-fact language and traditional poetic forms. "As you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form," Kumin writes, "the order—the marvelous informing order—emerges from it."

Kumin's ongoing fascination with the fragility of life took a dark turn in 1999 when she was seriously injured while preparing her horse for a dressage event. A memoir recounting her experience, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery, was published in 2000. Kumin has won many awards, including, most recently, the Ruth Lilly Prize. A former U.S. Poet Laureate, she lives on a farm in New Hampshire.

"Her poems become increasingly unforgettable, indispensable. Thoreau would commend her honesty, the precision of her language and her occasional moral allegory."—New York Times Book Review

Maxine Kumin's appearance is presented in cooperation with the Academy of American Poets as part of National Poetry Month.