Poetry-in-the-Round Fall 2007
- All readings are followed by a reception and book signing. Poetry-in-the-Round is directed by John Wargacki, assistant professor of English. For more information please call Dr. Wargacki at 973-671-9000, ext 5105.
Admission to all events is free of charge to both students and community, but seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis.
The Authors
James Hoch Sharon Olds James McCorkle Jeffrey H. Gray
Beck Rooms A & B (Walsh Gallery) @ 7PM
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Prior to teaching, James Hoch was a dishwasher, cook, dockworker, social worker and shepherd. His poems have appeared in Slate, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg, Ninth Letter, Carolina Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review
and many others. They have been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Summer Literary Seminars, and received a 2007 NEA grant as well as a grant from the PA Council on the Arts. Miscreants was published by WW Norton in June 2007. A Parade of Hands won the Gerald Cable Award and was published in March 2003 by Silverfish Review Press. Originally from Collingswood, N.J., he resides in Mahwah, N.J. with his wife and son. He has taught at Franklin and Marshall College and Lynchburg College. Currently, he teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Starlings
Before they plague the figs,
have their way with the ripe,
before they flee and leave fruit
pilfered, sacked black, still
hanging for wasps to house,
they squat hours camouflaged
deep in the canopy, waiting
for the fig's insistent call,
the pitch a scent, a stir, binary
night song of the corpus.
Love, if only ours were bird
fig
, not dog whimper, dog snarl,dog flicking its teeth, tongue,
dog tracking a fence line,
dog heaving its less sweet,
less true, undivided body.
Jubilee Hall Auditorium @ 7PM
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
The author of eight volumes of poetry, Sharon Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops at New York University and has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first collection, Satan Says (1980); the Lamont Poetry Selection and National Book Critics’ Circle Award for The Dead and the Living (1984). Her poetry, Michael Ondaatje says, is “pure fire in her hands,” while David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement
describes her work as “remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move.” With sensuality, humor, sprung rhythm and stunning imagery, she expresses truths about domestic and political violence, sexuality, family, relationships, love and the body. Her collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (2004), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995) and The Father (1992). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares. A resident of New York City, Ms. Olds also helps run a workshop at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely disabled. She was named New York State Poet Laureate (1998-2000).
My Son the Man
Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
— from the collection
The Wellspring
Beck Rooms A & B (Walsh Gallery) @ 7PM
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
James McCorkle’s collection Evidences was selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR/Honickman Poetry Award; new work of his appears in APR, Barrow Street, Boston Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Fence, Harvard Review
and Ploughshares. He is also an associate editor of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry. He has received fellowships for his poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation; he also received the first Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence University. He is also the author of a study of postmodern poetry, The Still Performance, and editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry. Living in Geneva, New York, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Africana Studies Program, English Department and General Studies Program.
from "Iron Path [Eisen-Steig]"
Language can be considered moving toward its end so as
to exist in a preserved state or toward its transformation
that is away from stability; a dead language belongs to
the archive where the sayable and the unsayable cease
their opposition, where there is no estrangement, except
from the living, yet among the living to be estranged
corresponds the loss of the sensory, to confess one's loss.
— from the collection Evidences
Beck Rooms A & B (Walsh Gallery) @ 7PM
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Jeffrey Gray is Professor of English at Seton Hall University, where he teaches courses in American poetry, postcolonial literature, and literary theory. He is author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2005) and editor of the five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry
(Greenwood, 2005). His poetry has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, American Poetry Review, Midamerican Review, The Literary Review, and many other journals. With the help of a MacDowell Colony grant, he has recently completed a book-length poem series. He is a two-time Fulbright recipient, and has lived and taught in Central America, the South Pacific, Asia, and Europe.
Bubbles of words swarmed
at their mouths and ears, coursed
in paths through the oblong yard,
till the light that streamed in them released
them, invisible; history like a bird
that flies from a dark doorway, traces
its shadow across our world.
I see now what its flight erases:
a time from which even then they recoiled,
toward a lie of places green.
— from “Family Film”