Sexton on Lowell in the classroom

The class met at Boston University on Tuesdays from two to four in a dismal room the shape of a shoe box. It was a bleak spot, as if it had been forgotten for years, like the spinning room in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. We were not allowed to smoke, but everyone smoked anyhow, using their shoes as ashtrays. Unused to classes of any kind, it seemed slow and uninspired to me. But I had come in through the back door and was no real judge. […]  

 In November I gave him a manuscript to see if he thought “it was a book.” He was enthusiastic on the whole, but suggested that I throw out half of it and write another fifteen or so poems that were better. He pointed out the weak ones and I nodded and I took them out. It sounds simple to say that I merely, as he once said, jumped the hurdles that he had put up. But it makes a difference who puts up those hurdles. He defined the goal and acted as though, good race horse that I was, I’d just naturally run the course. […]  

The last time I saw Mr. Lowell was over a year ago before he left for New York. I miss him as all apprentices miss their first real master. He is a modest man and an incisive critic. He helped me to distrust the easy musical phrase and to look for the frankness of ordinary speech. If you have enough natural energy he can show you how to chain it in. He didn't teach me what to put into a poem, but what to leave out. What he taught me was taste. Perhaps that’s the only thing a poet can be taught. 

-- from the recollection of Anne Sexton, published under the title "Classroom at Boston University" in Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs, edited by Jeffrey Meyers (University of Michigan Press, 1988); cross-posed to the BU Graduate Program in Creative Writing blog

David Ferry to read at Boston University

The estimable poet and translator David Ferry will be launching the Fall 2012 Poetry Reading Series at Boston University, on Monday, September 24th at 6 PM. This free and public reading will take place in the Katzenberg Center, 3rd Floor, 871 Commonwealth Avenue (BU West T-stop on the Green Line). (RSVP here)

Ferry is the author of Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, winner of the 2000 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He is the translator of Gilgamesh (1992), The Odes of Horace (1998), The Eclogues of Virgil (1999), The Epistles of Horace (2001), winner of the Landon Translation Prize, and The Georgics of Virgil (2005), all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ferry's other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine.

His new book, Bewilderment, was released this year by the University of Chicago Press.

Books will be available for sale. Please contact Meg Tyler at (617) 358-4199 or mtyler@bu.edu with any questions. This event co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at Boston University and the College of General Studies.

BU MFA poets at the Boston Playwrights' Theater

At 7 PM on May 15, 2012, come to the Boston Playwright's Theater at 949 Commonwealth Avenue, for the final session in the BU MFA poetry reading series, featuring Susan Barba, Mike Brokos, Bryan Coller, Megan Fernandes, L. E. Goldstein, Abriana Jette, Natasha Hakimi, and Kelly Morse. Wine and cheese reception to follow.

 

ABOUT THE READERS

• Susan Barba is the managing editor at David R. Godine, Publisher/Black Sparrow Books. She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University, and her writing has appeared in Boston Review, Words Without Borders, and The Yalobusha Review. She has a poem forthcoming in the Hudson Review, and she lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children.
• Mike Brokos hails from the mid-Atlantic, growing up outside of Baltimore, earning an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Maryland, and living in the Washington, DC area for several years before coming to Boston to work on his MFA in Poetry.
• Bryan Coller grew up in Southern California where he attended UC Irvine. He studies and teaches creative writing at Boston University.
• Laura Goldstein is from Niceville, Florida. She finished a creative writing M.A. in August from the University of Southern Mississippi, and is now pursuing her M.F.A in poetry from Boston University.
• Natasha Hakimi holds both a B.A. in Spanish and a B.A. in English with a creative writing concentration from the University of California, Los Angeles.She has received several awards for creative writing, including the May Merrill Miller Award for Poetry in 2008 and 2010, the Ruth Brill Award for short fiction in 2010 and the Falling Leaves Award in 2010. Natasha writes for Los Angeles Magazine and Truthdig and is pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in Poetry at Boston University.
• Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English Literature at UC Santa Barbara. She is the editor of Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books 2011) and has two forthcoming chapbooks, Organ Speech (Corrupt Press, November 2011) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press, January 2012). She has also been published in Upstairs at Duroc and Media Fields: Science and Scale.
• Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Abriana Jette holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and English from Hofstra University. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Boston University where she is a Betsey Leonard Fellow. She is a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow, an AWP Intro Journal Project nominee, and teaches at the Boston Academy of Arts.
• Kelly Morse grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but has since drifted as far as Spain, South Africa and even the East Coast. Most recently, her work has appeared in PoetsArtists and Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi. Kelly is currently working on a series that explores linguistic and world-view gaps between Eastern and Western cultures after a two-year stay in Vietnam.

For more information please visit: http://www.facebook.com/events/323200821086669. This event cross-posted at the Boston Poetry calendar.

OCTOBER BREAKWATER READING

The Breakwater Reading Series presents writers from the MFA programs of UMass-Boston, Emerson, and Boston University. This month's session features Drew Arnold and Danielle Jones-Pruett of UMass; Mike Brokos and Abriana Jette of BU; and Lauren Picard and Wesley Rothman of Emerson. Friday, October 21, 7pm, at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline (C-line to Coolidge Corner). Free and open to the public.

BU ALUM NAMED ASME FINALIST

William Giraldi, a 2004 graduate of the BU MFA program in fiction, has been named a 2011 National Magazine Awards Finalist for his essay "The Physics of Speed" in the Fall 2010 issue of The Antioch Review. From the essay:

In the following days I learned that absence takes up space, has mass, moves from room to room. Grief is much heavier than fear. Fear hung before me in anticipation, whereas the grief was planted like a sequoia in my stomach, its roots reaching far down into my legs for water, its branches reaching up through my arms and torso and neck, the poison from its fruit spilling into my cells. Each terrible dawn stretched across the day and illuminated my father's absence.

 If you'd like to read the whole piece, subscribe to The Antioch Review, or ask to borrow my copy -- I'm happy to mail it out.

BU READING

The Annual Creative Writing Faculty Reading this year will include readings by: Leslie Epstein (Program Director); David Ferry; Louise Glück (United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner); Allegra Goodman (National Book Award finalist); Ha Jin (Awardee of National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway, twice, and a PEN/Faulkner winner); Ronan Noone; Sigrid Nunez; Robert Pinsky; (United States Poet Laureate); and Maya Sloan.

Tuesday, Apr 12, 2011 at 6 PM, in the SMG Auditorium, 595 Commonwealth Avenue. Free and open to the general public. For more information, contact the Creative Writing administrator by email.

PINSKY AT TUFTS

Robert Pinsky,  faculty member in BU’s Creative Writing program and this year’s winner of the John Holmes Memorial Poetry Award, will be reading from his own work next Thursday, April 7th, from 3:30 – 5 PM in the Hirsh Reading Room at Tufts University’s Tisch Library. An exhibit celebrating his literary accomplishments will be on display in the lobby through May 24th. This event is free and open to the general public. Address: 35 Professors Row, Medford, 02155.

Among other work, he will be reading from his forthcoming book, Selected Poems (FSG, April 2011). Visit BU Today to read an interview of Pinsky by John O’Rourke, on the question of why poetry should be spoken.

TABATABAI AT BU CENTRAL

Sassan Tabatabai will be reading his original poetry and translations from Persian TODAY at BU Central at 5 PM. The performance space is in the lower level of the Boston UniversityGeorge Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Avenue, accessible off the BU Central stop on the B-line Green Train. Sponsored by the Iranian Student Association.