| Carolyn Forche:Of Poetry and Politics In praising Carolyn Forche's last collection of poetry, Angels of History ¬which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott found "a voice that spoke, speaks, and will continue to haunt the future." With her new collection, Blue Hour (published in hardcover 2003, paperback 2004), this intellectually and emotionally engaging poet enters an elegiac realm between life and death, between earthly consciousness and ethereal being. The core of Blue Hour is "On Earth," an abecedary, modeled on ancient Gnostic hymns from the third century A.D. It is a rhythmic incantation of mem¬ories, both earthly and spiritual, visited upon someone in the moments before death. With an uncommon grace of language and imagery, Forche juxtaposes the serenity of the mundane - "a horse tangled in its tether" "a little hotel in the city with its windows open" - and jarringly extraordinary - "a corpse broken into many countries" "a taxi and three gunman" - sometimes melding both to exquisite effect: "a coin of moonlight on the shattered place." In her customary way, she weaves the weight of history and the thoughts of those who have preceded her in the quest for poetic and philosophical distillation: Rene Char, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Rimbaud. Shorter poems hinge, too, on ideas of eath, loss, and the recovery of memory. Forche first made her presence known with her book of poems, Gathering of Tribes (1976), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. These poems are characterized by their longing for kinship and com¬munity, exploring as it does the voices of Pueblo Indians and her Czechoslovakian ancestors. Her second book of poetry, The Country Between Us, was based on her experience writing for Amnesty International in El Salvador between 1978 and 1980. According to the Dictionary of literary Biography (DLB) , she worked as a journalist and activist with the archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Romero, who was assassinated, while saying mass, by a right-wing death squad. This book, along with the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, revived the controversy over whether good poetry could or should be political. Forche argued that "all language is political" and "vision is always ideolog¬ically charged." Her 1994 book of poetry, Angel of History, concentrates on the effects of war in the last century: the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, as well as genocide in El Salvador. DLB describes the book as "one sustained, experimental poem without closure." The Threepenny Review described it as "instantly recog¬nizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half-century of atrocities that has yet been written in English." Her poetry is challenging to read, but she has been singled out for her "poet¬ry of consummate beauty" (Publishers Weekry), her "intelligence and musical¬ity" (Denise Levertov), and her "dark, richly textured, complicated work" (Boston Globe). Contemporary Authors says her ability "places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov. " She teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. --Adapted with permission from HarperCollins
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| Wednesday, November 10, 2004 • 12:30pm-2pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall Wednesday, November 10, 2004 • Dearlove 209, $10 fee • 4:30pm-6:30pm • Miller Auditorium • Dearlove Hall |
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| Sculptures in Sound and Stone: Paul Pines If you came to ACC and studied American literature or poetry writing, you might have met Paul Pines, an intense man who makes sea-green eye contact with a candor and compassion born of great hardship, one imagines. His poetry courses consist of inventions that spiral like a nautilus out of one philosophical premise or another, such as Robert Bly's concept of poetry as a form of "leaping," or Carl Jung's theory Paul Pines of the collective unconscious. Should you come to ACC on October 6 at 7 p.m., you will get a chance to hear Pines read from his poetry as a guest of both The Writers Project and Adirondack Community College's Visual Arts Gallery to augment the Gallery's current exhibit, "Mythology of Stones: The Sculpture of Bradford Graves." This multi-media event was a plot hatched mainly by Sheldon Hurst, the Gallery's curator. Pines was invited to read because of his connections to Graves and the poet William Bronk, who inspired two of Graves' sculptures, now part of ACC's permanent collection. In addition to teaching, Pines is a psychotherapist at Glens Falls Hospital and a writer who has published five books of poetry, two novels, and had two of his screenplays optioned by independent production companies. His first novel, The Tin Angel (1983), based on his experience as a jazz club owner, was called superb and "the verbal equivalent of jazz" by the Washington Post. While traveling in Central America, he was so moved by the "genocidal policy targeting the Guatemalan Mayans" that it inspired his second novel, Redemption (1997). His third and fourth books of poetry Hotel Madden Poems (1991) and Pines Songs (1993) were both nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Pines' poetry ranges from visual, haiku-like bursts to more erudite philosophical ponderings of death and the spiritual fabric of life. In his 2003 poetry collection Adrift on Blinding Light, he navigates the murky waters of self and soul. Open now, the Graves sculpture exhibit will close on October 14. The reception for the show is September 23, and may include both music and poetry. But to get a full dose of Pines' poetry, come out October 6 at 7p.m. to the Visual Arts Gallery. --Lale Davidson
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| Wednesday, October 06, 2004 • 6pm-7pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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| Bruce Coville: The Mythic Path to Young Minds Bruce Coville's fiction has made avid readers out of millions of children (and hooked adults as well). A quick look at customer reviews on Amazon.com reveals that not only do readers from grades five to eight adore him, but many return to him as adults, finding that his fiction improves with age (theirs and its). He is the author of more than eighty books ranging from picture books to ghost story anthologies and his "Unicorn" series, to his best selling "My Teacher" series and "Alien Adventure" series (best characterized as comic science-fiction). Drawing liberally on mythic crea¬tures such as unicorns and dragons, Coville's fiction is famous for its "boisterous energy." "One of the reasons we have this problem with reluctant readers, espe¬cially among boys," said Coville to Contemporary Authors Online,"is that we're not writing to who and what we are. If you write a book that's a brilliant character study and is won¬derfully tasteful and no kid ever reads it, you've failed..." Therefore, his stories are some¬times characterized by "outrageous extremes..." On the surface you will notice the zany humor, but just below the surface you will find Coville's stories tread the well-worn paths of ancient and modern myth. "Myth is very important to me," he says. "My picture books have firm roots in basic mythic patterns. Hopefully, the patterns do not intrude, but provide a structure and depth that enhances my work. "I do not expect a child to read my picture books and suddenly discover the secret of the universe. I do hope that something from my works will tuck itself away in the child's mind, ready to present itself as a piece of a puzzle on some future day when he or she is busy constructing a view of the world that will provide at least a modicum of hope and dignity." Coville knew that he wanted to be a writer in sixth grade: "As it happened, I had spent most of that year making life miserable for my teacher by stead¬fastly failing to respond to the many creative devices she had to stimulate us to write. Then one day she simply (finally!) just let us write - told us that we had an extended period of time to produce a short story of sub¬stance. Freed from writing topics imposed from without, I cut loose, and over several days found that I loved what I was doing." Coville was an elementary school teacher for seven years until he finally gave it up to become a full time writer. His wife, Katherine Deitz, illus¬trated The Foolish Giant, his first published book. Not only does Coville light up what might otherwise be a dark world of reading for reluctant youth, he is also renowned for giving energetic and mesmerizing performances of his work. His reading at ACC promises to be an occasion not to be missed. He will also be giving a workshop for adults in writing children's literature. Call the ACC Center for Personal and Professional Development to register. --Lale Davidson
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| Monday, October 18, 2004 • 12:30pm-2pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall Monday, October 18, 2004 • Dearlove 209 $10 • 4:30pm-6:30pm • Queensbury • Queensbury Hotel |
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