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Lecture at St. John's Explores the Shift Toward the Long Poem
FOR RELEASE: January 19, 2010
CONTACT: Patricia Dempsey, 410-626-2539
Patricia.dempsey@sjca.edu
Mary Kinzie, a professor from Northwestern University, will give a lecture at St. John's College on "Writing Long: The Shift Toward the Long Poem in Frank Bidart and Others." The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium on Friday, January 29, at 8:15 p.m.
"My thought is that the long poem has fallen out of favor because the audience for spoken poetry has been so formed (or dis-formed) by the setting of the ‘poetry reading,’" notes Kinzie. "Over the last 20 years I have found myself drawn to longer poems and sequences; my poetic ‘arc’ has extended itself. I have also become interested in the partitions (some as thin as rice paper) between prose and poetry, and have tried to reach the poem through the refinement of prose that grows finer as it is revised. Then the synapse is jumped."
Kinzie is a professor of English at Northwestern University. A recipient of the Guggenheim, Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, Kinzie is the author of seven poetry collections and two volumes of critical essays.
This lecture is supported by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Hodson Trust. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this lecture do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Hodson Trust.