[Wgcp-whc] Bidart session this Friday--books available as well as a special Bidart sneak preview poem

[Richard Deming]

425 × 500 - everseradio.com 
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Dear Fellow Poeticians,

this Friday the WGCP will meet from 3PM - 5 PM in WHC in room 116 for our preliminary discussion of Frank Bidart’s most recent collection, Metaphysical Dog. We turned up 3 additional copies of the book and they have been left in WHC 116—go grab a copy if you missed your chance earlier.  Also now at the Whitney Humanities Center are photocopies of a new long poem (39 pages!) that Bidart has sent to us to look at and discuss.  This poem hasn’t been published yet (though Poetry Magazine has announced they will soon be publishing it).  Thus, we have a sneak preview. 15 copies of this are at the WHC 116, so pick one up.  Again, these go fast, so I might now wait.

Bidart himself will join us on Dec 5th at 3 PM to help us continue our discussion of his work.  In a review of Metaphysical Dog that appeared in Slate Jonathan Farmer has this to say: "Part of [Bidart’s] genius over the years (this is his eighth collection, reaching back to 1973’s Golden State, and he now claims a rightful place in the ranks of American masters) has been his ability to present the drama of that which cannot change.” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/06/metaphysical_dog_a_new_book_of_poems_by_frank_bidart_reviewed.html <http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/06/metaphysical_dog_a_new_book_of_poems_by_frank_bidart_reviewed.html>

Below, I will paste his bio, pulled from the Academy of American Poets.

The WGCP is open to all guests and visitors, so please do feel free to pass word of these sessions to any interested parties.

Onward,
Richard Deming, Co-Coordinator 

Bidart reading at the NBA ceremony, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2gt1nY4NcY


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Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California on May 27, 1939 and educated at the University of California at Riverside and at Harvard University, where he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell <http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-lowell> and Elizabeth Bishop <http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/elizabeth-bishop>.
His first volume of poetry, Golden State (G. Braziller, 1973), was selected by poet Richard Howard <http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/richard-howard> for the Braziller Poetry series, but it wasn’t until the publication of The Sacrifice (Random House, 1983) that Bidart’s poetry began to attract a wider readership. Bidart’s early books are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

His recent volumes include Metaphysical Dog: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); Watching the Spring Festival: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Star Dust (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002); and Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. He is also the co-editor of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

About his work, the former U.S. Poet Laureate Louise Glück has said, “More fiercely, more obsessively, more profoundly than any poet since Berryman <http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/john-berryman> (whom he in no way resembles) Bidart explores individual guilt, the insoluble dilemma.” And about his career as a poet, she said, “Since the publication, in 1973, of Golden State, Frank Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country.”

His honors include the Wallace Stevens Award <http://www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/prizes/wallace-stevens-award>, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America, and The Paris Review‘s first Bernard F. Conners Prize for “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky” in 1981. In 2007, he received the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

Bidart was elected a Chancellor <http://www.poets.org/academy-american-poets/chancellors> of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has taught at Wellesley College since 1972.

Selected Bibliography

Metaphysical Dog: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)
Watching the Spring Festival: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)
Star Dust (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books, 2002)
Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997)
In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990)
The Sacrifice (Random House, 1983)
Golden State (G. Braziller, 1973)
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