Poetry at Beinecke Library

Please join us for a poetry reading by poet Joy Harjo on Wednesday, April 9th, at  4 pm, at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street (please note venue change). This event is co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library and the Native American Cultural Center at Yale. The reading is free and open to the public.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, poet Joy Harjo is an enrolled member of the Muskogee Tribe. She is the author of many collections of poetry, including How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, A Map to the Next World: Poems, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award, and In Mad Love and War, which received an American Book Award. She has received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

For more information about Joy Harjo and examples of her work visit:

http://www.joyharjo.com/

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/60

http://www.nativewiki.org/Joy_Harjo

Please join us for a poetry reading by former United States Poet Laureate Donald Hall on Wednesday, February 6th, at 4 pm. This event is free and open to the public. The Beinecke Library is located at 121 Wall Street, New Haven.

Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He is the author of many collections of poetry including recent titles such as White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, Painted Bed, and Without: Poems. In 1988 Hall’s The One Day (1988), won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Hall has been awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Silver Medal, a Lifetime Achievement award from the New Hampshire Writers and Publisher Project, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Poetry. In June 2006, Hall was appointed the Library of Congress’s fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He lives in Danbury, New Hampshire.

For more information about Donald Hall and examples of his work visit:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/264
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/more_hall.html
http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum178.php

Please join us at 4pm on Thursday, January 17th for a reading and discussion by scholar Janet Malcolm, about her new book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice published this fall by Yale University Press. Malcolm researched this work in the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers at the Beinecke Library. Janet Malcolm is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Reading Chekhov, among other books. She writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and lives in New York City. This event is free and open to the public.

Two Lives is a work of literary biography and investigative journalism exploring the lives of modernist writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. “Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. “The key of ‘I’ will not unlock the door to their meaning—you need a crowbar for that—but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein “solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of “magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.

The Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series on line finding aid for streaming audio of poetry readings at the Beinecke Library has recently been updated to include 2006 and 2007 readings by John Ashbery, Fanny Howe, Terrance Hayes, Major Jackson, Ron Padgett, and Natasha Trethewey, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry. The 2007 Yale Student Poets reading, featuring Georgiana Banita, Mary Daniel, Rebecca Dinerstein, Adam Eaker, David Gorin, David Griswold, Erich Matthes, Chiara Scully, Jenni Sorkin, and Samantha Tonini has also been posted. These readings as well as many others recorded since 2002 can be streamed directly from the finding aid: Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series.

Beginning in fall 2007, recordings of many events in the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series will be available as podcasts that can be downloaded as well as streamed directly from the web. The first podcasted event, Charles Bernstein’s October 2007 poetry reading, is now available: Charles Bernstein Reading at the Beinecke Library MP3. New podcasts of recent readings will be added to the following page as soon as they become available: Beinecke Library Readings: Podcasts and Steaming Audio.

Image: A reading by famous poets of selections from their own works. From the Bryher Papers.

Please join us for a poetry reading by Frank Bidart on Tuesday, November 27th, 4 pm. This event is co-Sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series and the Department of English; the reading is free and open to the public. The poet will be introduced by Yale graduate student Erica Levy McAlpine. For additional information about readings at Beinecke Library visit: 2007-2008 Readings at Beinecke Library.

Frank Bidart is the winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize for poetry. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90, Desire, Star Dust, and Music Like Dirt. He has received the Wallace Stevens Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry. He has taught at Brandeis University and, since 1972, Wellesley College. In 2003 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

For more information about and examples of Frank Bidart’s work visit:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/162
http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/07-02-26-02.all.html
http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/98_99/bidart.html

Please join us for poetry readings by Graham Foust and Elizabeth Robinson on Thursday, November 15, 2007, 4pm. This event is free and open to the public. For additional information about readings at Beinecke Library visit: 2007-2008 Readings at Beinecke Library.

Graham Foust is the author of three books of poetry, Necessary Stranger, Leave the Room to Itself, and As in Every Deafness and numerous poetry chapbooks. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is currently the Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at St. Mary’s College of California.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, Under that Silky Roof, House Made of Silver, and Bed of Lists. She has been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of emerging women poets, and Instance Press.

For more information about and examples of Graham Foust’s and Elizabeth Robinson’s work visit:

Graham Foust
http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/foustg_poems1.htm
http://www.typomag.com/issue02/000026.html
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/graham-foust-wrote-two-books-of-poems.html

Elizabeth Robinson
http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/elizabeth_robinson02.shtml
http://brooklynrail.org/2007/9/poetry/three-poems-by-elizabeth-robinson
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/04/elizabeth-robinson-is-author-of-6.html

Please join us for a poetry reading by Christian Bök on Thursday, November 1, 4 pm. This reading is co-sponsored by the Beinecke Library’s Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection and the Beinecke Library-Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Contemporary Poetry. The event is free and open to the public. The Beinecke Library is located at 121 Wall Street, New Haven.

Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök is the author of books including Crystallography, a pataphysical encyclopedia, Eunoia, a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters, and Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Crystallography was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut and Eunoia, the best-selling Canadian poetry book of all time, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. He is a professor at the University of Calgary.

For more information about and examples of Christian Bök’s work please visit:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bok/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_B%C3%B6k
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bok.html

UPDATE: Listen to a netcast of the reading here: Charles Bernstein Reading at Beinecke Library

Please join us for a poetry reading by Charles Bernstein on Tuesday, October 16, 4 pm. This event is free and open to the public. The Beinecke Library is located at 121 Wall Street, New Haven.

Charles Bernstein is the author of some 20 collections of poetry including Girly Man, With Strings, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Dark City , Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, and Stigma. He is the author of volumes of prose and criticism including My Way: Speeches and Poems, A Poetics, and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Charles Bernstein was the co-founder the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the co-editor of the anthology The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. He has written librettos for several operas and has worked with composers such as Ben Yarmolinsky, Brian Ferneyhough, and Dean Drummond. He has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more information about and examples of Charles Bernstein’s work please visit:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bernstein
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/703
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bernstein.html

Please join us for a poetry reading by Yusef Komunyakaa on Thursday, September 20, 4 pm. This event is free and open to the public. The Beinecke Library is located at 121 Wall Street, New Haven.

Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of many collections of poetry, including Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Dien Cai Dau, and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989. He has received awards from the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross.

For additional information about African American Studies at the Beinecke Library visit: http://beineckejwj.wordpress.com.

For more information about and examples of Yusef Komunyakaa’s work visit:
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/22
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/komunyakaa/poetry.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/komunyakaa.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusef_Komunyakaa

Fall 2007 Readings at Beinecke Library

Yusef Komunyakaa
Thursday, September 20th, 4 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series

Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of many collections of poetry, including Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Magic City, Dien Cai Dau, Thieves of Paradise, and Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is also the author of Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. He has received the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross.

Charles Bernstein
Tuesday, October 16th, 4 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series

Charles Bernstein is the author of some 20 collections of poetry including Girly Man, With Strings, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Dark City , Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, and Stigma. He is the author of volumes of prose and criticism including My Way: Speeches and Poems, A Poetics, and Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Charles Bernstein was the co-founder the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and the co-editor of the anthology The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. He has written librettos for several operas and has worked with composers such as Ben Yarmolinsky, Brian Ferneyhough, and Dean Drummond. He has been awarded fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christian Bök
Thursday, November 1, 4pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Co-Sponsored by the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection
and the Beinecke Library-Whitney Humanities Center
Working Group in Contemporary Poetry

Christian Bök is a Canadian experimental poet. He is the author of numerous books, including Crystallography, a pataphysical encyclopedia, and Eunoia, a lipogram that uses only one vowel in each of its five chapters; Eunoia was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002. He is a professor at the University of Calgary.

Graham Foust and Elizabeth Robinson
Thursday, November 15th, 4 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series

Graham Foust is the author of three books of poetry, Necessary Stranger, Leave the Room to Itself, and As in Every Deafness and numerous poetry chapbooks. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is currently on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at St. Mary’s College of California.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, Under that Silky Roof, House Made of Silver, and Bed of Lists. She has been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of emerging women poets, and Instance Press.

Frank Bidart, Poetry Reading
Tuesday, November 27th, 4 pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Co-Sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series and the Department of English

Frank Bidart is the winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize for poetry. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-90, Desire, Star Dust, and Music Like Dirt. He has received the Wallace Stevens Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry. He has taught at Brandeis University and, since 1972, Wellesley College. In 2003 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

A regularly-updated list of Fall 2007 readings scheduled at Yale University can be found on line: 2007-2008 Readings at Yale University