Featured series 
Tag: Poetry
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Campus & Community
Gazette staffer recognized for poetry
Sarah Sweeney of the Harvard Gazette has been awarded a $5,000 prize from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. The foundation annually honors poets under the age of 40 whose work celebrates the human spirit.
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Arts & Culture
Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Kingsley Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, a venerable critic, takes another crack at the 20th century’s greatest poets’ last works and how their style reflects their contemplations of death.
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Campus & Community
Stephen Burt named National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
Associate Professor of English Stephen Burt has been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in Criticism for his book “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry.”
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Arts & Culture
How the West was written
Western poet Katie Peterson, a Radcliffe Fellow, shares her sense of desert life on a vast canvas with startling intimacy.
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Arts & Culture
Purgatory
This is Zurita’s harrowing chronicle of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile, along with the writer’s subsequent arrest and torture. It’s a visually stunning book of unforgettable poems.
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Campus & Community
Radcliffe fellow Brown receives Whiting Writers’ Award
Jericho Brown, a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and assistant professor of English at the University of San Diego, will receive the 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award on Oct. 28 at a ceremony in New York City.
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Arts & Culture
Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry
In 30 essays Burt serves up literary criticism like you’ve never seen it before — his charming, excited prose unknots the web or poetry and knits a tapestry.
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Arts & Culture
Norton Lectures interrogate the novel
Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, will deliver Harvard’s traditional Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, in a series of six talks on novels and novelists that begin Sept. 22.
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Campus & Community
2008-09: A look back
As Commencement closes another chapter of the Harvard story, here is a brief backward glance at highlights of the year that was.
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Campus & Community
Sobering poems, more sobering oration mark PBK
Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) chapter first met in 1781, two years before the end of the Revolutionary War.
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Arts & Culture
Sarah Messer’s surreal poetics
With long, sun-streaked tresses, Sarah Messer doesn’t strike one as a poetess whose work conjures American histories in bewitching, surrealist twists. But Messer’s poems navigate farther and farther from the familiar mainland into a world wholly her own.
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Campus & Community
Japanese government honors Professor Edwin A. Cranston
The government of Japan announced its decision to award Edwin A. Cranston, professor of Japanese literature, the decoration of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, on April 29.
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Arts & Culture
Writers at risk talk about their lives
For some, words are both a way of life and a way of risking life. Last year, 877 writers and journalists around the world were killed, jailed, or attacked.
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Arts & Culture
Arts Medalist Ashbery ’49 charms audience
Before John Ashbery ’49 was one of the most influential and celebrated poets of modern times, he moonlighted as an English translator of French detective novels under the pseudonym “Jonas Berry.” But the self-dubbed “hair-brained, homegrown, Surrealist” poet bestowed his fitting absurdist style to these books, including adding the sex scenes the publisher requested to…
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Arts & Culture
Harvard has new poetry Web site
On an abnormally sweltering spring day, one would expect to see patches of Harvard students sunbathing in the Yard, not reading poetry inside Lamont Library. But a throng of students, faculty, and staff gathered inside the modest-sized Woodberry Poetry Room on a sultry Tuesday (April 28) evening to celebrate the release of Poetry@Harvard, a new…
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Arts & Culture
Pros teaching prose
Clicking keyboards provide a soundtrack to the semester’s end, as students put finishing touches on term papers, theses, dissertations, and the like. But amid the flurry of traditional writing assignments, there are other projects afoot. Short stories, for example. Screenplays. Fiction manuscripts. Personal essays.
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Arts & Culture
Poet/critics and the state of the art
A triumvirate of prominent poet-critics – each with strong Harvard ties – took on the meaning of contemporary poetry last week. And despite a lively discussion, none of them provided a comprehensive definition.
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Arts & Culture
Gail Mazur reads at Radcliffe
After removing her soaked red sneakers, Radcliffe Fellow Gail Mazur read aloud from new poems Monday (April 6) in dry black socks. The poet was undeterred by the onslaught of gray rain that thrashed Radcliffe Gymnasium’s windows — a fitting backdrop for Mazur’s charged, emotional poems.
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Arts & Culture
Atkins, Dennehy to perform poems of T.S. Eliot
In the first lines of “The Waste Land,” a touchstone of modernist poetry from 1922, T.S. Eliot offers an ambiguous view of the very month we are in: April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
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Arts & Culture
Briggs-Copeland reading features poets Klink and Richards
Tonight (Feb. 19) at 7, Houghton Library hosts Harvard’s first Briggs-Copeland Poetry Reading. The event, held in the Edison and Newman Room, will feature readings by Joanna Klink and Peter Richards, two of Harvard’s six Briggs-Copeland Lecturers. Bret Anthony Johnston, director of the creative writing program in the Department of English, will provide an introduction.
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Arts & Culture
Woodberry curator named Bynner Fellow
Woodberry Poetry Room Curator Christina Davis has been awarded one of two 2009 Witter Bynner Fellowships by Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. Davis and the other recipient, Mary Szybist, from Portland, Ore., will each receive a $10,000 fellowship, and both will read from their works in a public event at the Library of Congress on Feb.…
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Arts & Culture
Prolific poet John Ashbery ’49 will receive 2009 Harvard Arts Medal
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Ashbery ’49 will receive the 2009 Harvard Arts Medal in a ceremony kicking off the Arts First festivities on April 30.
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Arts & Culture
‘The health of poetry’
As a graduate student at Oxford, Gwyneth Lewis wrote her dissertation on 18th century literary forgery. But as a working poet for three decades — and this year as a Radcliffe Fellow — she is as far from that fraud as conceivable.
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Arts & Culture
Achebe celebrates African literature with poetry
Chinua Achebe, the esteemed Nigerian novelist and poet, delivered this year’s Distinguished African Studies Lecture at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Greeting the standing-room-only crowd in Tsai Auditorium earlier this week (Nov. 17), Achebe surprised the group by announcing that he had an unusual program in mind.
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Arts & Culture
Poetry, music, death take the stage at New College Theatre
John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72 returned to Harvard on Nov. 17, where he attended a performance of his piece by Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra (a group he led in the 1960s) at the New College Theatre.
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Arts & Culture
Puzzling through Yeats with Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler knows a thing or two about William Butler Yeats. She has authored three books on the Irish poet’s work, including her most recent volume, “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form,” published in 2007.
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Campus & Community
Fall commences motley fete
If “April is the cruellest month,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem “The Wasteland” — then November is certainly the most marvelous. Judging from the glorious display of fall foliage in a Harvard Yard stimulated by chill breezes and hosting a thousand squirrels, this year’s turning leaves are a short-lived sight to behold.
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Arts & Culture
Heaney ‘catches the heart off guard’
Over the years, readings by poet Seamus Heaney have been so wildly popular that his fans are called “Heaneyboppers.” A reading this week at Sanders Theatre, sponsored by Harvard’s Department of English and American Literature and Language, was no exception. The event’s free tickets were gone weeks ago, within hours, and on Tuesday (Sept. 30)…
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Arts & Culture
Radcliffe Fellow Markovits talks about ‘mad, bad, dangerous’ poet
George Gordon, Lord Byron died in 1824 at the age of 36 — a short life, but long enough for Byron to become a personage so vivid and controversial that he was arguably the modern era’s first celebrity.
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Campus & Community
Weinberg, Phillips honored at PBK ceremony
Late this morning (June 3), Adam Goldenberg ’08 — in a fashionable bow tie and flowing academic robes — joined a long line of gowned seniors in the shade of trees outside Harvard Hall. A few months before, the Vancouver, B.C., social studies concentrator had dressed a little differently (in pink tights and a yellow…