Poetry Foundation: Frank Bidart

Start: 10/14/2010 6:00 pm

Now in its 56th year, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished reading series in the country. Inaugurated by Robert Frost, Poetry Day has featured such poets as T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, and Adrienne Rich.

In a career spanning 30 years, Frank Bidart has established himself as one of the most original and compelling poets of his generation. Initially influenced by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and later by his teacher Robert Lowell, Bidart has expanded the possibilities of poetry. His unflinching examination of human desire and guilt, often as manifested in deviant or distraught personalities, has opened once-taboo territories. His nonlinear, magpie forms, as well as his typography and punctuation are dictated by the unusual content of his lines rather than convention. Bidart is the author of eight critically acclaimed collections, including, most recently, Desire, Star Dust, and Watching the Spring Festival (all from Farrar Straus & Giroux). Desire was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received his second Pulitzer nomination for Music Like Dirt, the only chapbook ever to be so honored. He won the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award in 1997, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2000, and the Bollingen Prize in 2007. A past chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Frank Bidart has taught at Wellesley College since 1972.

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make
—from “Lament for the Makers”

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library

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