Seattle Arts & Lectures' annual Poetry Series features readings, on-stage interviews, and book signings at INTIMAN Theatre.
All readings begin at 7:30 p.m.

Established in 2000, SAL’s annual Poetry Series has become one of Seattle’s most important and highly anticipated literary programs. Poetry is an essential literary form, but poets often receive less attention than prose writers. In creating the series, SAL recognized that, as a literary organization, it had a responsibility to ensure that this great art form thrived in our community. The series is presented in collaboration with INTIMAN Theatre and Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of only two poetry-only bookstores in the United States.

The 2006 Poetry Series features:

Robert Bly: Monday, March 6, 2006

Robert Bly is one of the most prominent and influential poets, editors, and translators of the postwar generation. Born in 1926, Bly grew up on a farm in western Minnesota. After receiving degrees from Harvard University and the University of Iowa, he was awarded a Fulbright grant to visit Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. He returned determined to bring the work of foreign poets to light in the United States, and has worked tirelessly since, as an editor and translator, to do so. Bly's translations of poems by writers as geographically and historically diverse as Basho, Neruda, Lorca, and Transtromer helped introduce American poets and readers to a wealth of imagistic poetry.

Bly's own poetry is similarly imagistic, while also meditative and visionary, witty and thought provoking. It is "receptive to the primitive and the sophisticated, the 'wild' and the ingenious" (Library Journal). The author of more than thirty books of poetry, he is a Rockefeller fellow, National Book Award winner, and two-time Guggenheim fellow. Bly has also been an outspoken social critic, anti-war activist, and leader in the men's movement. He lives in Minneapolis.

"Robert Bly has opened the doors of experience, insight, and language, lifting them toward a universal understanding of what poetry means in the lives of people throughout the world" -Bloomsbury Review

Adrienne Rich: Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Born in 1929, Adrienne Rich is one of the foremost poets and essayists of our time. The author of nearly twenty volumes of poetry, she is the recipient of virtually every major award for poetry, including the Bollingen Prize, Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and National Book Award. Her career began in 1951 when her first volume, A Change of World, was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her career gained momentum as the feminist movement did, and Rich emerged as one of its most profound proponents and preeminent theorists.

During the 1980s, Rich broadened her scope to address a wide swath of political and societal issues. To find "resemblance in difference," she writes, is "the core of metaphor, that which lives close to the core of poetry itself, the only hope for a humane civil life." From the personal to the political, her poetry has been lauded as elegant, intelligent, and essential. Rich's most recent collections include The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (2004) and Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001). She lives in northern California.

"Rich is one of our most distinguished poets...and one of the things that distinguishes her art is a restless need to confront difficulty, a refusal to be easily appeased." -Robert Hass

Tony Hoagland: Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Like Walt Whitman, Tony Hoagland investigates selfhood, manhood, and America; like Frank O'Hara, he does so with immense wit, vernacular, and vulnerability. "A really good poem," writes Hoagland, "is the poem which breaks through the television screen into the world and reminds the reader that reading or listening is not a safe, living-room-lazy-boy-museum-tea-party experience, but that poetry is about open heart surgery, being woken up, or taken somewhere unexpected and dangerous."

What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), Tony Hoagland's most recent book, has been characterized as "disarming" by the New York Times Book Review, "and as sharp-edged and ambitious" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, "Hoagland turns heartache into poetry so beautiful it makes you crave melancholy." Tony Hoagland's second collection, Donkey Gospel (1998), won the 1997 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and his first, Sweet Ruin (1992), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson College MFA program in North Carolina.

"Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild." -American Academy of Arts and Letters citation, 2002

Peter Gizzi, Tyehimba Jess, and Mary Ruefle: Monday, April 10, 2006

Please join us for a special evening featuring these three innovative poets whose work charts new territory in the landscape of contemporary poetry. Seattle Arts & Lectures is pleased to present this event in conjunction with the Academy of American Poets and Wave Books, a new poetry publishing house. The event will be moderated by Joshua Beckman, author of Nice Hat. Thanks. and Your Time Has Come and Editor of Wave Books.

Frequently named as one of the most exciting poets writing today, Peter Gizzi is lauded for his "sensual intelligence" (Chicago Review), for his ability to be "inventive without being impudent, gorgeous without being gaudy" (Los Angeles Times), and as the creator of "a new, and often beautiful lyric mode" (Harvard Review). The author of three books, including most recently, Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003), Gizzi is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (1998). He directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"It is exhilarating to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so rooted in history, a world where so much is at stake," writes Brigit Pegeen Kelly of Tyehimba Jess' debut collection, leadbelly: poems (2005). Winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series, the volume examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician in a collage of song, culture, and circumstance. A native of Detroit, Jess is an alumnus of the Chicago Green Mill Slam teams and Cave Canem, and is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In the world of Mary Ruefle's poetry, the architecture sways delightfully from baroque to spare, from tragedy to comedy. In eight volumes (including, most recently, Tristimania), Ruefle offers her readers a primer in the pleasures of unsteadiness, whimsy, and wildness. "In poems striking for their vivid, playful and original use of the imagination," writes Charles Simic," she brings us an unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world." Ruefle is a Guggenheim fellow and professor in the M.F.A. writing program at Vermont College.

For information about poets who have appeared in the Poetry Series, please visit our author archive.