[Yale-readings] Richard Howard and Gabriella Calvacoressi 12-8, Labyrinth

[nancy.kuhl at yale.edu]

Gabriella Calvacoressi in conversation with Richard Howard ? The Last Time I
Saw Amelia Earhart: Poems

Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 5:30PM ? Labyrinth New Haven (NH)

Gabrielle Calvocoressi grew up in central Connecticut. Her poems have appeared
in a number of journals, including The New England Review, Ninth Letter, and
The Paris Review (from which she received the Bernard F. Connors Prize for the
long poem). A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, she
has been both a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. She
lives in Berkeley, California.

"In Gabrielle Calvocoressi's bracingly intelligent debut collection, the voices
of the 20th century chorus a darkly American legacy: here are the ordinary
wounded, the disappointed, the casual witnesses, the suffering dead of circus
fires and industrial toxins, the survivors of ruined little towns after the
mines and factories shut down, the huge bodies on the screen of the 'adult
drive-in' looming over the field and the highway. Formally alert, both
compassionate and achingly observant, this is a book of remarkable maturity and
power."

?Mark Doty

"These poems, with their surprising mix of lyric rigor and unswerving realism,
make a powerful claim on the reader. Here are small towns, dark images, lost
lives and found memories, all brought into existence by an unsettling music.
This is the first book of a wonderfully talented poet."

?Eavan Boland

"Gabrielle Calvocoressi's 'Circus Fire' cycle (at the very heart of this amazing
book) is nothing short of a feat of nature--nature gone wrong, a story husked by
fear and flame, a freak devastation, but rendered with zero Sentementia,
relentless and simply hewn. There is no accident in this book, not a glimmer of
excess. The only extravagances here are the clarity of Calvocoressi's wayward
way, her lucidity of heart, the gifts of her fine, disquieting, distilled
imagination."

?Lucie Brock-Broido

The Silent Treatment
New Poems ? By Richard Howard

This is the third collection of new poems by Richard Howard to be published by
Turtle Point Press. In these poems, Howard, in the tradition of the dramatic
monologues perfected by Ezra Pound and Robert Browning, speaks through the
masks of high cultural figures such as George Eliot, Hannah Arendt, Cosima
Wagner, as well through an unknown boy in a photograph by Mike Disfarmer, an
Arkansas photographer from the thirties.

In a recent published conversation, Howard says:

?I don?t like self-expression. All the work that I do is some kind of
invocation of or transaction with others, whether its criticism, translation,
or poetry. There are poems that are direct self-expression, but certainly, with
some sense of preference, there is an enterprise, which invokes speaking through
a mask, a persona. That?s what the word means: sounding through?sonans
per?and I like the idea of the mask or the masks, because I?m more
interested in the dialogue of others than in merely the dialogue with
another?the dialogue of the others who are out there, who are not me.?

Silent Treatment is a collection of poems in which speech reveals character but
also in which speech is character, rich, varied, complex, fascinating. And
here, once again, Richard Howard reveals himself as one if the most significant
poets in America today.

Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Howard has received the MacArthur and Guggenheim
Foundations fellowships, as well  as many major awards. He is the poetry editor
for the Paris Review. He is a poet, scholar, teacher, translator, and critic. He
is the author of more than a dozen books. His Selected Prose, published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was short listed for the National Book Critic Circle
Award last year.

?Richard Howard is an indispensable, unique poet, whose work instructs by
delighting and delights by instructing?He is Browning?s authentic heir at
rendering the inner voices of the cultural past and present.?

?Harold Bloom

?How lucky we are that Howard has not stopped, that he continues to translate
not only from the French but from the darker, more guttural languages of the
heart, whose murmurs he has amplified into his own playfully syllabic music.?

?David Bergman