A Reading by Mark Strand

Hosted by Boston University College of Arts and Sciences

Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, gives this fall’s Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture, a biannual poetry reading in honor of former Boston University visiting lecturer and author Robert Lowell, who in the 1950s taught poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck, among others. Strand, Rosanna Warren, Boston University’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, and Basil Cleveland (GRS’05), a lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program, celebrate Lowell’s legacy with a recital of their work.

Cleveland begins by reading six brief poems about the “transfigurations that take place” in everyday life. Warren follows, reciting a series of poems documenting the emotional and physical progression of a loved one’s battle with cancer. She then introduces Strand, praising his “eerie, suggestive poetic fables,” which “offered a way out of several stalemates of poetry in the 1950s,” when they first appeared. Strand’s selections span his 40-year career, from the serious, reflective early poem “Violent Storm” to the tense and ominous “Marsyas” to the lighthearted “Man and Camel,” from his new volume of the same name. He humorously tackles aging in “Dark Harbor” and death in “2002,” beginning “I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.” Strand ends, however, with the reverent seven-part poem about the crucifixion of Jesus “After the Seven Last Words,” which he wrote despite his own lack of faith.

The Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture Series was established in 2005 to bring distinguished writers to campus to read their works alongside a member of the Creative Writing Program faculty and a recent program graduate. The series is funded by Nancy Livingston (COM’69) and her husband, Fred Levin, through the Shenson Foundation, in memory of Ben and A. Jess Shenson.

October 10, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Photonics Center

Video length is 1:00:06.

About the speaker:
Mark Strand is a Canadian-born poet, fiction writer, and translator whose unique poetic voice — a mix of surrealist influences, symbolist imagery, and minimalist sensibility — has profoundly influenced American poetry since the 1960s. His first two collections, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) and Reasons for Moving, Darker and The Sargentville Not (1968) were critically acclaimed and established Strand as a major force in modern poetry. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Strand was poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991. He has received numerous prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for Blizzard of One (1998), a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, and a Fulbright Fellowship in 1960. He is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In addition to publishing 11 collections of poetry, Strand has taught at several universities, including Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Iowa. He left the University of Chicago, where he was Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, in 2005 and currently teaches at Columbia University. He holds undergraduate degrees from Antioch College and Yale University and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa.

E-mail this

Keyword
From
To
By Topic
By Host

Receive updates as new videos are posted

In addition the BUniverse mailing list, you can also receive updates via RSS.

RSS is a system of syndicated news feeds that are updated every time the web site is updated. Subscribe to RSS