"Reading the Lyric" Lecture Series Commences With James Longenbach
June 23, 2010
The venerable critic and poet will also give a poetry reading to Michael Collier's Introduction to Poetry class.
The Center for Literary and Comparative Studies welcomes James Longenbach, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, on Thursday, October 1 for a talk titled, "Tone Poems: Poetic Sequence and Poetic Series." The event will be held in Ulrich Recital Hall in Tawes at 4:00PM.
Longenbach is one of the nation’s most respected poetry critics and also an accomplished and admired poet. He holds the Joseph Henry Gilmore chair at Rochester and is the author of nine books. To quote from the University of Rochester website: “Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent book of poems, Draft of a Letter, is about the vicissitudes of belief—belief not in what is distant and strange but in what is close and familiar: our bodies, our words. His most recent critical work, The Art of the Poetic Line, is an account of the work of lineation in free-verse, syllabic, and metered poetry (ranging from Shakespeare to Ashbery). He has also written widely about modern and postmodern poetry, sometimes emphasizing the historicity of poetic language (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things) but also exploring the ways in which poems resist their historical situation (The Resistance to Poetry).”
On Wednesday, September 30, Longenbach will visit Professor Michael Collier's Introduction to Poetry (ENGL 243) class to give a reading to his undergraduate students, but all are invited to attend. The class is held in H.J. Patterson Hall Room 0226 from 12:00 to 12:50PM.
Longenbach's appearance inaugurates the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies' "Reading the Lyric" Series, a part of its theme of "Reading: Histories, Practices, Futures."