Editor: Keith Davis Writers: Shana Gulko '00, Dave Maley Publisher: Office of Public Information Volume 22, No.13   March 13, 2000

Poet Laureate to Inaugurate Humanities Series Robert Pinsky, the 39th poet laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize nominee, will serve as the first distinguished speaker in the humanities, in a new series sponsored by the School of Humanities and Sciences. His visit to the College on Monday, March 27, will include a free public presentation, "The Sounds of Poetry," at 7:30 p.m. in Textor 102. His books will be available for purchase and autographing at the presentation. In March 1999 Pinsky was reappointed to an unprecedented third term as poet laureate. He also teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University, serves as poetry editor of the on-line journal Slate, and is a frequent contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He has spent much of the past two years working on the Favorite Poem Project, a program of the Library of Congress that is designed to capture America’s enduring passion for poetry. He is assembling an audio-video archive of 1,000 Americans — from all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life — reading aloud their favorite poems and briefly describing the significance of the poem in their lives. "This will be a gift to the nation’s future: an archive that may come to represent, in a form both individual and public, the collective cultural consciousness of the American people at the turn of the century," says Pinsky. The title of Pinsky’s Ithaca College presentation, "The Sounds of Poetry," is also the title of his 1998 book, an entertaining account of how poetry works, with brief, informative chapters devoted to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, and blank and free verse. Pinsky’s next collection of poetry, Jersey Rain, is due out this year. Previous collections include The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry; History of My Heart (1984), which won the William Carlos Williams Prize; and An Explanation of America (1980), winner of the Saxifrage Prize. He has also published three books of criticism, including Poetry and the World (1988), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and two books of translation, including The Inferno of Dante (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 1999 Pinsky was awarded the Harold Washington Literary Award. His writing has also won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and from 1979 to 1986 he was poetry editor at the New Republic.

ITHACA | Back Issues | Table of Contents | NEWS Home | Publication Schedule | Letter to the Editor Created by Andrejs Ozolins. Updated 9. March. 2000