[Wgcp-whc] Frank Bidart books available--next session 11/21

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,

I'm writing to say that copies of Frank Bidart's Metaphysicial Dog are now available in Room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  You will see them on a shelf opposite the door and near the window.  We will have our initial discussion of that book on Friday Nov 21st from 3 PM - 5 PM in room 116 of the WHC.  Then the poet will join us for our continued conversation on Friday Dec 5.  We just ask that people take a book only if they feel they can make at least one if not both sessions.  The books do go quickly so I'd recommend stopping by earlier rather than later.

Here is the Judges Citation from last year's National Book Awards: Metaphysical Dog one the award in poetry.  There is also a brief description of the book puled from the NBA's site.

citation

Frank Bidart’s powerful new poems wrestle with the poet’s sexuality, obsessively rehearse his past, and violently collide with themselves. But for all their confessional qualities, they are also formally brilliant in their deft modulations of tone and their often strenuous line breaks and visual form, their tortuous bends and twists of syntax. Although Bidart prefers the rough hewn and blunt to the conventionally beautiful, his language sometimes borders on the mellifluous. A major achievement in a distinguished career.
About the Book

In “Those Nights,” Frank Bidart writes: “We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not.” Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet’s most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.

Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:

In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last

human beings’ relation to God. Decipher

love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see

why it never should have been thought whole.

This “ancient work” reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the “hunger for the Absolute”—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled “History is a series of failed revelations.”

The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

About the author

Frank Bidart’s most recent full-length collections of poetry are Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award and, most recently, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He teaches at Wellesley College.



And here you will see an excellent review by Stephen Burt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/books/review/metaphysical-dog-poems-by-frank-bidart.html?_r=0


And below I will paste information about an event happening on Monday that shouldbe of interest to people on this list.

Remember, the WGCP is open to everyone, so do feel free to pass word to anyone who might be interested in our activities.

Onward,
Richard Deming, Co-cordinator

+++

Literature, the Arts, and the Environment Colloquium presents Louise Glück


Event time: 
Monday, November 3, 2014 - 5:30pm
Location: 
Linsly-Chittenden Hall (LC), 319 See map
63 High St.
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 
The Literature, the Arts, and the Environment Colloquium will be hosting a public conversation with poet Louise Glück about her new book of poems, Faithful and Virtuous Night.

More about Faithful and Virtuous Night:

http://us.macmillan.com/faithfulandvirtuousnight/louisegluck

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/louise-glcks-faithful-and…

Contact Information: http://amlitintheworld.commons.yale.edu/arts-environment-colloquium/

Contact: 
Department of English
203-432-2233



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