|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
 |
|
Seattle
Arts & Lectures' annual Poetry Series features readings, on-stage
interviews, and book signings at INTIMAN Theatre. 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. Support for the 2007 Poetry Series has been provided by: The
2007 Poetry Series features: Mark Strand: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand was born on Prince Edward Island in 1934 and spent his childhood in cities across Canada, the United States, and South America as his salesman father followed work. “I seem to be a tourist on planet Earth,” he has said. Indeed, feelings of displacement, of floating, of existential travel pervade Strand’s work. In twelve collections of poetry, including Blizzard of One (1999) and, most recently Man and Camel (2006), he has explored age-old questions of selfhood and mortality through precise language and surreal imagery. He is “a poet of mood, of integrated fragments, of twilit landscape, and of longing,” praised Henri Cole in Poetry. Strand also writes prose, children’s books, and art criticism (he is particularly interested in Edward Hopper); translates poetry; and teaches at Columbia University. His work has garnered him nearly every award, grant, or prize possible in poetry. Suffice it to say that mail emblazoned with “Rockefeller,” “Fulbright,” “Guggenheim,” “MacArthur,” and “Bollingen” has arrived at his New York City residence. In 1990, he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States. “Strand’s poems resonate with a shimmering sense of the infinite that befits his stature.” –New York Times Kevin Young : Tuesday, March 13, 2007 Kevin Young is a self-avowed packrat. He collects old books, photographs, vinyl records—many of which have made their way into his writing. “I…like the search,” he says, “going into old stores in random towns and being surprised at what’s there. It’s the search, not the owning, that I like—it’s like writing in that way.” In a little over a decade, Young has searched, and found, his way to writing more than five critically acclaimed, ambitious, and lusciously readable books. His debut, Most Way Home (1995), was chosen by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series. His third volume, Jelly Roll {A Blues} (2003), won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book is For the Confederate Dead (2007). “Young turns cliché inside out,” Booklist declared, “in an ingenious celebration of improvisation in art and in life.” In his spare time, Young collects poems as the editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), John Berryman: Selected Poems (2003), and the Everyman Pocket series of Blues Poems (2003) and Jazz Poems (forthcoming). “In just ten years since his debut, Young has become a leading poet of his generation.” –Publishers Weekly Carolyn Forché: Monday, March 26, 2007 “Poetry is what maintains our capacity for contemplation and difficulty,” says Carolyn Forché. Known as a “poet of witness,” Forché travels to complicated terrains—both literally and metaphorically—and lives there in difficulty, in contemplation. After her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Young Poets Award, Forché received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her experiences there formed the basis for her second collection of poems, The Country Between Us (1982), which received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America. Forché’s exquisite attention to the world has been realized not only through her own writing, but through her efforts to bring others to light. She is the editor of Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993), an anthology of poets from around the world who “endured conditions of extremity during the twentieth century.” She has also translated works by Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegria and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. For her work as a poet, translator, and activist for social and political change, Forché recently received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture. “Carolyn Forché hovers above the lacerated landscape of history, filling the holes between saying and said.” –C.D. Wright Charles Simic : Tuesday, April 10, 2007 Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, Charles Simic spent his childhood in war-torn Belgrade and escaped to the United States—via Paris—in 1952. Having already fallen in love with jazz, which was prohibited in his homeland, Simic quickly fell in love with the rest of American culture. Today the Pulitzer Prize-winning author is simultaneously one of our finest American poets and finest poets of exile. Simic’s writing also inhabits two continents: his influences range from Serbian folklore to Emily Dickinson, from riddles to blues lyrics. His poetry brims with delightfully strange connections, dry wit, and straightforward diction. “He uncovers unexpected depth in apparently commonplace language,” praised the New Republic. The author of more than sixteen collections of poetry—the most recent, My Noiseless Entourage (2005)—Simic has also published essays, memoirs, and numerous translations. Among his many accolades, he was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000, is a winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. “Charles Simic’s writing comes dancing out on the balls of its feet, colloquially fit as a fiddle, a sparring partner for the world.” –Seamus Heaney For information about poets who have appeared in the Poetry Series, please visit our author archive.
|
