Plymouth, N.H.—The Eagle Pond Authors’ Series at Plymouth State University will host Pulitzer Prize-wining Poet Galway Kinnell at 7 p.m. March 31 at the Silver Center for the Arts.
During a career in poetry that spans five decades and 12 published collections, Kinnell has earned not only the Pulitzer Prize, but a National Book Award, the Frost Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship. National Book Award judges called him “America’s pre-eminent visionary … whose work greets each new age with rapture and abundance [and] sets him at the table with his mentors: Rilke, Whitman and Frost.”
Kinnell is renowned as an especially sensuous poet and a moving reader. His public readings have made him influential in embedding the poetry reading as a part of our cultural life.
“There’s not a specific something I’m aiming for, but there is something that’s almost unspeakable and poems are efforts to speak it bit by bit, like a burden that has to be laid down piece by piece, that can’t be just thrown off,” Kinnell says.
His varied career has taken him to Iran as a teacher and journalist and to Louisiana as a fieldworker for the Congress of Racial Equality.
Kinnell’s volumes of poetry include Strong Is Your Hold. A New Selected Poems, Imperfect Thirst, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, Selected Poems, The Past; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, The Book of Nightmares, Body Rags, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock and What a Kingdom It Was. He is the editor of The Essential Whitman.
Free tickets for the reading are available at the Silver Center Box Office, (603) 535-ARTS (2787) or (800) 779-3869. A book signing and reception will follow the reading. For information contact Diane Jeffrey at the Silver Center, (603) 535-2874 or by e-mail to djeffrey@plymouth.edu.
The next reader in the series will be Oni Buchanon at 7 p.m. April 20.
The Eagle Pond Authors’ series is named for former New Hampshire and U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s ancestral home in Wilmot. Hall is cofounder of the series, which is presented by the Silver Center and supported by a generous grant from the Plymouth State University Bookstore and Follett Higher Education Group.
General information about events at PSU is available at ThisWeek@PSU, http://thisweek.blogs.plymouth.edu.
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