EVENT: Andrea Hollander Budy and Sheryl St. Germain to read at International Poetry Forum, Dec. 5
Poets Andrea Hollander Budy and Sheryl St. Germain will give a joint poetry reading in Pittsburgh, Pa., at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Oakland at 8 p.m., Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2007.
The event is hosted by the International Poetry Forum, for decades now the most impressive venue in the Appalachian region for poets of national and international acclaim. I heard Richard Hugo there one time. Also, Stephen Spender and Maxine Kumin. Many of the greats from Dannie Abse to Jane Kenyon to Paul Zimmer have appeared there. Tickets are $12 for adults, $8 for students or seniors. For tickets and information contact the International Poetry Forum at (412) 621-9893 or by email at IPF1@earthlink.net.
The International Poetry Forum was founded in 1966 by Samuel Hazo, still the director and also poet laureate of Pennsylvania. For all of his labor of love throughout the life of the forum, many poets and readers are grateful. Hazo is one of those poets, too, who astonish his listeners with not only the poems themselves, but with his amazing memory of them.
By the way, Hazo is a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is the McAnulty Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Duquesne University and the author of thirty books of poetry. His books, available through Amazon.com, Books-A-Million, other bookstores, and in libraries, include:
Just Once: New and Previous Poems
Once for the Last Bandit: New and Lost Poems
The Holy Surprise of Right Now: Selected & New Poems
Nightwords: 50 Poems
The Past Won’t Stay Behind You: Poems
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Food for thought:
Dr. Hazo, interviewed by David Sokolowski in 1989, had this to say on the poetic process:
“I’ve never been of the persuasion that poetry is something you do because you choose to do it. I think what Dick Wilbur said in an interview about a week ago when he was resigning from the poet laureateship is correct: ‘I just want to come back and play tennis and take care of my garden and wait for a poem to hit me on the head.’ A poem, if it’s going to be any kind of poem at all, has to come and use you — hit you on the head. It also involves a certain reciprocity on your part. You may be wrestling with a particular subject that presents a dilemma to you or a paradox to you, or creates a mood for you, and suddenly a poem comes to you that subsumes that, and then you’re writing something on which, for the moment, the focus of your life depends, and it occupies all your attention for the duration of its inspiration and your refinement of it. I could quote Frost to you: ‘A momentary stay against confusion.’ That’s what poetry is; it’s a time when suddenly things come into focus, and you work under the imperative of some impulse, something you did not will into being, that came to you, and you must work it out in words that are just now coming to you, that are making you put everything that you have at that moment right on the line. ”
