Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture: Carl Phillips

Hosted by Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Creative Writing Program

Award-winning poet and BU Creative Writing Program alumnus Carl Phillips (GRS’93) reads from his new collection, Speak Low, for the semiannual Lowell Lecture. He is joined by poets Brandy Barents (GRS’06) and Rosanna Warren, BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities.

As a young poet, Phillips “stepped forward with a voice of astonishing authority,” Warren says; since then, “he has been consistent and loyal to his talent and at the same time, in book after book, bold.” Phillips’ selections for the evening — from “The Plains of Troy,” a depiction of madness in Sophocles’ Ajax, to the ominous calm of the Mississippi River in “The Storm” — exemplify his long-time focus on the themes of “moral and psychological damage, regret, and freedom.” He also recalls his time at BU, thanking poetry professor Robert Pinsky in particular “for helping me to believe I could be this thing that is apparently called a poet.”

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. It honors Robert Lowell, the former BU professor who taught young poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck in the late 1950s. 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 8, 2009, 7:30 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video Length is 00:55:43.

About the Speakers:

Brandy Barents (GRS’06) is a lecturer in the College of Arts & Sciences and at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as well as the programs director of Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. Her poems have appeared recently in Barrow Street.

Carl Phillips (GRS’93) is a professor of African and Afro-American studies and English at Washington University in St. Louis. He has won numerous fellowships and prizes, including the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize for his first collection of poems, In the Blood (1992). He recently published his tenth book of poetry, Speak Low (2009).

Rosanna Warren is a University Professor, the Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities, and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and Romance studies at Boston University. The author of several books of poetry and criticism — most recently Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (2008) — she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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