2009-2010 Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series

Thanks to the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks endowment, Westminster College presents its twenty-first annual poetry reading series in 2009-2010. This year’s series is also funded by a grant from Salt Lake County through its Zoo, Arts, and Parks program. For more information, please contact Natasha Sajé, professor of English and director of the series, at (801) 832-2376 or nsaje@westminstercollege.edu Please note that readings begin at 7:00 p.m. and are followed by receptions and book signings.

Anne Carson

Thursday, September 17, 2009
Vieve Gore Concert Hall, Emma Eccles Jones Conservatory

Anne Carson was born in 1950 in Ontario, Canada, and was educated at the University of Toronto as a classicist. Since 1992, when she published Short Talks, she has consistently won acclaim for her unusual books of poetry, including The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost (1999); Autobiography of Red (1998), shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize; Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1996); Glass, Irony and God (1995), shortlisted for the Forward Prize; Men in the Off Hours (2000); and Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005). Carson is also a classics scholar, the translator of Greek plays, as well as If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), and the author of Eros the Bittersweet (1998). Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, in Fall 2007. She has taught at McGill University in Montreal and the University of Michigan, and now teaches at New York University.

"In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry," wrote Daphne Merkin in the New York Times Book Review, "Anne Carson…has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration." Carson's writing is, according to Merkin, "unclassifiable, even by today's motley, genre-bending standards.” Carson riffs from film, criticism, essay, and plays and blends these in consistently surprising ways.

But her work is not only interesting for its formal innovation. Anne Carson also honors emotional encounters—with lovers, parents, friends, the self-exposing them in all their honesty. Her erudition is always infused with feeling, and often with humor. Her work is intimate at the same time that it refers to other literature and art; her ability to make art a newly living thing is unparalleled.

Book signing sponsored by The King’s English Bookstore.

Edwin Torres

Friday, October 23, 2009
Vieve Gore Concert Hall, Emma Eccles Jones Conservatory

Born in 1965 in New York of Puerto Rican parents, Edwin Torres started creating (often bilingual) text and performance work in 1988 under the banner "I.E. Interactive Eclecticism," an invented 'movement' whose purposefully broad term gave his one-man variety shows a forum: e.g. I.E. Songs, I.E. Dances and I.E. Costumes were interspersed with audience interaction. In 1990, he discovered poetry at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and The St. Marks Poetry Project.

Torres has since collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that mingle poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound. His work has been noted by MTV's Spoken Word ,Unplugged, Rolling Stone Magazine, High Times, and thanks to his goatee, he’s made the cover of New York Magazine's "The Beats Are Back" issue.

Besides performing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Torres has performed at the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art.

He is recipient of poetry fellowships from The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, and The Poetry Fund; and his CD Holy Kid was part of The Whitney Museum's exhibition.

Poet and Reviewer Kenneth Goldsmith in A Popular Guide to Unpopular Music says of Torres: “Holy Kid straddles a position somewhere between Finnegans Wake and I Love Lucy. It's Gertrude Stein drunk on tequila. It's Jerry Lewis reciting the Ursonate. It's William Carlos Williams fronting a psychedelic band at the Fillmore East. It's Q-Tip as King Lear. It reconciles the diametrically opposed poetic agendas of the Nuyorican Cafe and Language Poetry, creating a type of sound poetry sure to interest both groups.” Michael Scharf, in Publishers Weekly writes of his work, “the politics are in the process—the poet moving forward in fleshly 3-D, formatting his words graffiti-like on the page and asking in his inebriated digital Creole: ‘Ever put the New in Yo?'"
Book signing sponsored by Sam Weller’s Bookstore

Community Workshop: The Lyric Essay

Instructor: Andrea Hollander Budy

Mondays, 4:30-7:20 pm, January 11, 2010; April 26, 2010

Not quite a poem—not quite an essay or both a poem and an essay? The lyric essay combines elements of both genres. According to practitioner Brenda Miller, editor of The Bellingham Review, “the lyric essay refuses precise categorization but rather relies on a spirit of playfulness that allows it to straddle many different literary borders.” In this workshop, we will attempt to define the genre for ourselves, not only by reading essays and by hearing what others have to say about the craft, but also (of course) by creating our own essays.

Andrea Hollander Budy is the author of three books of poems: Woman in the Painting, The Other Life, and House Without a Dreamer, which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Reviewer John Bradley has remarked, “There’s a clarity to her poems that can take your breath away. This is not to be confused with reductive simplicity; her poems often take unusual turns and delve into areas of great emotional complexity.” Other honors include two poetry fellowships: the National Endowment for the Arts and the Subiaco Award for Literary Merit for Excellence in the Writing and Teaching of Poetry. Budy has also edited When She Named Fire:An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009). For the past 17 years, she has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

To be considered for this free workshop, please mail a nonfiction writing sample of up to 20 pages and contact information (phone, email, address) to Natasha Sajé, English Department, Westminster College, 1840 South 1300 East, Salt Lake City, UT, 84105 by October 15. Participants will be notified by December 1