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

Beck Tuch on how lit mags matter

I’ll tell you, there is an essay from Granta that I read years ago and which I still think about every single day. There is a discussion forum in Boston Review from which I still quote in conversation. There is one poem that I read in Beecher’s many months ago, which flits through my mind constantly.

-- Becky Tuch, founding editor of The Review Review, responding in the Ploughshares blog to certain persistent myths about literary magazines

Kalogeris at the Grolier, September 2012

George Kalogeris reads from his new collection, Dialogos (Antilever Press), at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, on September 13, 2012. Video by Mark Schorr.

Class Act Poets, a reading at the Armory

7 PM, Tuesday, September 25, 2012
The Center for the Arts at the Armory
191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, MA

Reading on this occasion will be: Betty Barrer; Denise Provost; Anthony Majahad; Nellie Goodwin; Adnan Adam Onart; Audrey Henderson; Mary Buchinger; and Bob Brooks.

About the group
Class Act is a group of poets who are students in classes conducted by poet Susan Donnelly, author of “Eve Names the Animals,” “Transit” and “Capture the Flag.” Class Act poets have published books and chapbooks, won awards from The New England Poetry Club and elsewhere, are published in many journals, and are active in groups such as the Jamaica Pond Poets, Bagel Bards, C.R.E.W., and the Boston Poetry Union. Admission is free. For more information and samples of Class Act work visit their website at https://sites.google.com/site/classactpoets.

Katia Kapovich reads her English poems in Hamilton

Russian-born Katia Kapovich will be reading her English language poems on September 21st at Christ Church, 149 Asbury Street in South Hamilton, Mass. Come, bring flowers, wreathes, money to buy books. (RSVP here)

Kapovich has published nine volumes of poetry in English and Russian. Her latest is Cossacks and Bandits (Salt Publishing, 2007). She was a co-founder of Fulcrum ("an annual of poetry and aesthetics"), which was during the period of its publication one of the most esteemed magazines of its kind in the English-language poetry world.

For more information, you can go ogle her using the usual search engines, or visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/katia-kapovich.

Naked Girls Reading: They Might Be Giants

I've been asked to share news of this literary event, billed as "the biggest Naked Girls Reading ever!" Information from the Coolidge website:

Well, the tallest, anyway. We've got over thirty linear feet of Naked Girls reading some of the best flash fiction ever written. Every performer is at least 5'10" tall in her bare feet! Featuring: Betty Blaize, a Boston Babydoll, known as "six feet of fun"; Karina Valkyrie from Hudson, MA, a first-time Naked Girl who stands 6’1”; Legs Malone from New York City, who at 5’11” is billed as ‘The Girl with the Thirty-Four-and-a-Half Inch Inseam’; Lizzie Havoc, a local writer and bartender who at 6’3” is the tallest of the readers; and ‘Vita Lightly’, the alter-ego of former Boston Babydoll and professional model, Sarah Hartshorne, who is 5’10”." Tickets: $20 advance / $30 day-of-show.

Hartshorne, pictured above, also blogs at Erratic in Heels. You may have seen here on a previous season of America's Next Top Model, or at Trident Cafe on one of those afternoons a few years ago when she'd meet with certain editors of certain local literary magazines to read recent issues of literary magazines and comb through slush pile submissions.

The reading is happening on Saturday, September 22, 2012, 11:59 at the Coolidge Corner Theater,  290 Harvard St, Brookline, MA.

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.