Center for the Study of Europe Co-Sponsors Poetry Reading Series (Fall 2013)
Co-sponsored by the College of General Studies and the BU Center for the Humanities (BUCH), the Poetry Reading Series strives to make poetry a fundamental part of university and community life. By presenting the work of both renowned and emerging poets, the series attempts to broaden our vision of poetry’s concerns and effects. Last spring, the series co-sponsored the Center for the Study of Europe’s “Irish Voices” series, which featured readings by Colm Toibin, Ciaran Carson, and Paul Muldoon. We are delighted to see the series continue under the auspices of the Poetry Reading Series and the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture.
All readings are free and open to the public. Please direct any questions to series convener Meg Tyler.
Tuesday, October 15 @ 6 PM
Irish Voices: A Reading and Conversation with Michael Longley
One of the outstanding elegists and war poets of the last four decades, Michael Longley is also preoccupied with love – that ‘No Man’s Land’, as he calls it, ‘between one human being and another’ – and with the beauty (sometimes savagery) of the natural world. Those themes – as with such predecessors as Robert Graves and Edward Thomas – are entwined throughout his writings. Seamus Heaney calls him “a custodian of griefs and wonders.” Longley’s 1991 Gorse Fires won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Subsequently, The Weather in Japan (2000) won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry, the Hawthornden Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Longley’s recent publications include Snow Water (2004), Collected Poems (2006) and A Hundred Doors (2011). In 2001 Longley was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He divides his time between Belfast and County Mayo.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Europe, the Department of Classics (CAS), the literary journal AGNI, and the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture.
Tuesday, October 22 @ 6 PM
American Voices: A Reading and Conversation with Rowan Ricardo Phillips
EVENT POSTPONED TO FEBRUARY 2014!
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of a volume of poems, The Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), a collection of essays, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, and the first translation from Catalan into English of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. He is an associate professor of English and the director of the Poetry Center at Stony Brook University. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.
Co-sponsored by the Department of English (CAS) and the literary journal AGNI.
Monday, November 4 @ 6 PM
Irish Voices: A Reading and Conversation with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The Castle, 225 Bay State Road
EVENT CANCELLED!
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s transforming and transporting ways of seeing are like no other: there’s the ‘whisper of a cashmere sleeve,’ the nuns’ ‘leathery kiss’ and a lighthouse ‘scraping the sea with its beam.’ Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Acts and Monuments (1966), The Magdalene Sermon (1989), Selected Poems (2009) and The Sun-fish (2010). She translated Ileana Malancioiu’s After the Raising of Lazarus (2005) from the Romanian and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001, co-translated with Medbh McGuckian). She has won numerous awards, including the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the prestigious O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award by The Irish American Cultural Institute, which called her “among the very best poets of her generation.” She lives and teaches in Dublin.
This event will be moderated by Mary O’Donoghue, Irish fiction writer, poet and translator, author of Before the House Burns (The Lilliput Press, 2010) and Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007). She is also Associate Professor of English at Babson College.
Co-sponsored by the BU Arts Initiative, the Center for the Study of Europe, the literary journal AGNI and the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture.
Monday, November 11 @ 6 PM
European Voices: A Reading and Conversation with Tom Pickard
Tom Pickard’s volumes of poetry include Hole in the Wall: New and Selected Poems (2002), The Dark Months of May (2004), and The Ballad of Jamie Allan (Flood Editions, 2007) recounts the true adventures of an eighteenth-century gypsy musician who lived on the English-Scottish Borders and died in Durham jail, serving a life sentence for stealing a horse. His memoir, More Pricks Than Prizes, was published by Pressed Wafer in 2010. He has written for film, radio and television.
Young Tom Pickard for years ran the Morden Tower readings in Newcastle, Great Britain, and from early 1960s on was chief friend, host & proponent of new-wave American poetics . . . Under guidance from his friend the elder Basil Bunting he’s writ poetry with condensation, sharp focus and local speech directness, in lineage joining William Carlos Williams and ‘Geordie’ lyric vernacular.–Allen Ginsberg
This event will be moderated by the poet William Corbett, editor of Pressed Wafer.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Europe and the literary journal AGNI.