[Yale-readings] Connecticut Poetry Circuit announces Jeffrey Skinner 10/26, 5:00 pm, Marcus White Living Room

[Nancy Kuhl]

>Acclaimed poet and editor, Jeffrey Skinner reads as part of the Connecticut
>Poetry Series on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 5:00 pm in the Marcus White
>Living Room on the campus of Central Connecticut State University
><http://www.ccsu.edu>. Free and open to the public.
>
>from: http://www.ausablepress.org/c_skinner.html
>
>Jeffrey Skinner has published four collections of poetry: Late Stars, A
>Guide to Forgetting, The Company of Heaven, and Gender Studies. His work has
>received wide recognition, including fellowships from the National Endowment
>for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Howard Foundation.
>Currently Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of
>Louisville, he is also co-founder and editorial consultant for Sarabande
>Books.
>
>  IN HIS OWN WORDS
>
>"I would like to be the genetically engineered love child of Zbigniew
>Herbert and Dylan Thomas. That is, I would like to write poetry that has the
>philosophical ease and metaphoric inventiveness of the Eastern Europeans,
>and at the same time sings like a drunken Welshman. I would prefer it if my
>poems were a bit closer to speech on the elevation‹‹>/<‹‹speech spectrum;
>I¹m very fond of the casual talk of our time. And I would like to include a
>variety of tones and structural strategies‹dead serious and slapstick,
>formal and "free." I want the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I
>want to include that poor bastard they showed wiping out in slow motion on
>the ski jump every Sunday afternoon.
>
>  "I didn¹t discover poetry until I got out of college and was trying to
>figure out how to beat the draft and, secondarily, what to do with a degree
>in psychology/theater. By chance, I picked up a book by W.S. Merwin. I was
>completely flabbergasted by what I found inside. No one had told me you
>could do this with language. From that moment on, instead of working on an
>advanced degree in research psychology‹which is what I was supposed to be
>doing‹I spent my time in the unused depths of the University of Bridgeport,
>reading other books of contemporary poetry, and every back issue of Poetry
>magazine the library had. Then I started writing poetry, and then I took my
>first class in poetry, from the superb teacher and poet Dick Allen. I stayed
>up all night, many nights, smoking cigars and reading poetry. Ah, my
>twenties! I thought poetry was better than heroin. I still do. In fact, it¹s
>too bad poetry¹s not illegal, because if it were everyone would want to try
>it, and people would find out how good it is.
>
>  "We all want to know why the universe is the way it is and not otherwise.
>Or why it is at all. Poetry is my way of putting on such questions and going
>outside for a walk. It¹s good for all kinds of weather, for the country as
>well as the city. When I¹m inside poetry I seem compelled to enter the
>ocean, or an idea, or a city I once knew, or my own cruelty, or
>whatever‹without lying. Poetry seems to have something to do with attention;
>and with love, if one can say such a thing without getting all wet. But what
>that something is, I don¹t know."
>
>***************
>Ravi Shankar
>Poet-in-Residence
>Assistant Professor
>CCSU - English Dept.
>860-832-2766
>shankarr at ccsu.edu

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