Pulitzer Prize Winner Reads Poetry at Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture

By: anon-15 () in lecture series

The daughter of an oil driller, poet Kay Ryan was raised in the Mojave Desert, attended community [...]college, and later began writing poems using a deck of tarot cards to jump-start them. Ryan says she also found inspiration in the popular Ripley’s Believe It or Not! books. And unlike many of her contemporary colleagues, her poems freely employ rhyme.

Now 65, Ryan struggled for decades to be noticed (she self-published her first collection of verse); but all that changed in recent years. Her work has appeared regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. A two-term U.S. poet laureate, she has amassed numerous honors, among them the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Her latest collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, earned Ryan the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Ryan read from The Best of It at the 2011 Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture, a semiannual lecture that honors American poet Robert Lowell, who famously taught Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, George Starbuck, and many other poets at BU in the 1950s. Also reading was Katherine Hollander (GRS’06,’14), whose poems frequently draw on historical subjects, German and Yiddish fairy tales, and Greek and Inuit myths for inspiration.

Hosted by the Boston University Creative Writing Program on April 25, 2011.

Tags: Creative Writing Program, robert lowell, memorial lecture, kay ryan, katherine hollander, pulitzer prize for poetry

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