Thursday, March 29, 7:00 PM

"I wait to be haunted, as it were, by an image, … [for] something I see to register on a deeper level than most experience does. A seal in the harbor, or the wreck of a fishing boat. I'll feel this tug in my memory. Then I'll begin describing it to try to capture it. In the process of describing it I begin to understand what it is about the image that's compelling. It's not enough to describe it: the image is a vehicle for something I'm trying to understand. It's a metaphor-making process. My metaphors know more than I do: they know ahead of me."

-Mark Doty

Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Yin, Carolyn Kizer is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Harping On: Poems 1985-1995. Chief among her many achievements, she founded the journal Poetry Northwest in 1959 (serving as its editor through 1965) and, from 1966 to 1970, served as the first Director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. Broadly anthologized, her poems have been consistently selected for The Best American Poetry volumes. In addition, she has published several collections of essays and translations, including Picking and Choosing: Prose on Prose (1995), Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1994), and Carrying Over: Translations from Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Hebrew and French-African (1986). A former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Kizer lives in Sonoma, California, and Paris. Recently listed as one of "America's fifteen best contemporary poets,"

Mark Doty has published five books of poems and two memoirs, as well as poetry, prose, and criticism in numerous magazines and anthologies. His work has been honored with the T.S. Eliot Prize from the United Kingdom, a Whiting Writers' Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a PEN/Martha Allbrand Nonfiction Prize, the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry, and the Lambda Literary Award. Doty has been described as "a major poetic voice in his maturity, a writer of exultant and dazzling epiphanies in everyday life which follow the pain and confusion of loss." He currently teaches at the University of Houston, and lives in Houston and in Provincetown, Massachusetts.