JOHN ASHBERY POETRY SERIES AT BARD PRESENTS FREE READINGS THIS SPRING BY INTERNATIONALLY ACCLAIMED POETS

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The John Ashbery Poetry Series at Bard College presents readings by internationally acclaimed poets on four Thursdays—February 16, February 23, March 16, and April 10—at 6:30 p.m. Additional readings will be announced; check www.bard.edu. All readings will take place in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard. On Thursday, February 16, in the Weis Cinema, acclaimed poets and Bard professors John Ashbery and Joan Retallack will read from their recent work. John Ashbery was made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur by the French government in 2002. He was named poet laureate of New York State for 2001–02. In addition to receiving the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2001, he is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, published in 1975. His newest poetry collection, Where Shall I Wander; was published in 2005. Other collections include Chinese Whispers, As Umbrellas Follow Rain; Your Name Here; Other Traditions; Some Trees; The Tennis Court Oath; Rivers and Mountains; Shadow Train; April Galleons; Hotel Lautréamont; And the Stars Were Shining; Can You Hear, Bird; Wakefulness; and Girls on the Run. Ashbery is also the author of three plays; a novel (with James Schuyler); articles on art and translation; and verse set to music. Other awards and honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; Horst Bienek Prize, Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich; Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for Literature, Rome; Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, France; Robert Frost Medal, Poetry Society of America; and the Gold Medal for Poetry, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ashbery also served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1988. He is the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard. Joan Retallack’s most recent volume of poetry is Memnoir, published simultaneously last year in English and French. She is the author of six other poetry collections, including How To Do Things with Words, AFTERRIMAGES, and Errata Suite, which won the Columbia Book Award. Her book of critical essays, The Poethical Wager, was recently published by the University of California Press, which will also bring out her book on Gertrude Stein. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, coedited by Retallack and Juliana Spahr, was published by Palgrave/MacMillan in January. Retallack received a Lannan Foundation Literary Grant for Poetry in 1998 and the 1996 America Award in Belles-Lettres for MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack. Her WESTORN CIV CONT'D, a limited edition artist’s book, was produced at Pyramid Atlantic Studios in 1995–96 with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard. On Thursday, Feburary 23, in the multipurpose room, Bard professors Robert Kelly and Ann Lauterbach will read from their recent work. Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature, has been a member of the Bard faculty since 1961. He is the author of many collections of poetry, including The Common Shore, The Loom, Kill the Messenger, Not This Island Music, The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence, A Strange Market, Red Actions, The Time of Voice, and The Garden of Distances. His fiction works include A Transparent Tree, Doctor of Silence, Cat Scratch Fever, and The Queen of Terrors. Kelly has received the Los Angeles Times Prize for Poetry as well as awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, CAPS, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the founding editor of Chelsea Review and Trobar, and contributing editor to Caterpillar, Sulfur, Alcheringa:Ethnopoetics, and Conjunctions. Kelly was the founding director of the writing program of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Ann Lauterbach is the David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard and a faculty member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and the Center for Curatorial Studies. Her books include If in Time; Many Times, But Then; Before Recollection; Clamor; And for Example; and On a Stair. Lauterbach is a contributing editor of Conjunctions and wrote the column “The Night Sky” in American Poetry Review. She is the recipient of grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation, and has received a MacArthur Fellowship. The series continues with a reading by Tom Raworth on Thursday, March 16, in the Weis Cinema. Raworth was born and grew up in London. During the 1970s he traveled and worked in the United States and Mexico, returning to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King's College, Cambridge. Since 1966 he has published more than 40 books and pamphlets of poetry, prose, and translations. His graphic work has been shown in France, Italy, and the United States, and he has collaborated and performed with musicians, painters, and other poets. In 1991 he was invited to teach at the University of Cape Town, where he was the first European writer to visit in 30 years. Raworth is the recipient of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. Among his recent books are Tottering State; Landscaping the Future; Meadow; Etruscan Reader V; and Clean and Well Lit: Selected Poems, 1987–1995. On April 10 in the multipurpose room, the series presents a reading by Redell Olsen, Drew Milne, and Juliana Spahr. Redell Olsen is a poet, visual artist, and the managing editor of How(2), the online journal of contemporary innovative and modernist writing by women. Olsen’s publications include Book of the Insect; Book of the Fur; and Secure and Portable Space. Her poetry and critical work has appeared magazines in Britain and the North America; including in Pom2 (New York) and Performance Research (London and Dartington College of Arts). Recent performances and exhibitions include tExt 2004, Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter, and the Book Art Bookshop, London. Olsen teaches poetic practice at Royal Holloway, University of London, in a course that explores hybrid and interdisciplinary practices between poetry, performance, and new media. Scottish-born, Cambridge-based Drew Milne is the editor of Parataxis Editions and Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing. He is the editor of Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader; Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists; and A Parataxis Reader. He is the author of poetry collections The Damage: New and Selected Poems and Go Figure as well as Conversations with Terry Eagleton and Reading Marxist Literary Theory. Juliana Spahr (Bard ’88), a leading poet-critic of her generation, is the author This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity; Fuck You–Aloha–I Love You; and Response. The W. M. Keck Professor of Creative Writing and associate professor of English at Mills College, Spahr is founding coeditor (with Jena Osman) of Chain and is the recipient of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to study “The Crisis of Language in 20th-Century Literature.” (She frequently self-publishes her work, archived at http://people.mills.edu/jspahr.) Since 1995, the John Ashbery Poetry Series has brought leading contemporary poets to Bard for readings and discussion in an intimate setting. For further information about the series, call The Bard Center at 845-758-7425. # # # (2/6/06)

This event was last updated on 03-03-2006

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