Smith College
Office of College Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063
www.smith.edu/newsoffice

...............................................................................................................................................................

January 30, 2003
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Poets Marie Howe and Richard McCann to Read at Smith College

 

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.-Smith College will present a poetry reading by Marie Howe and Richard McCann at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 11, in Wright Hall Auditorium.


Longtime friends and celebrated poets, Howe and McCann both have written frequently and movingly about the loss of loved ones from AIDS.


Howe sees her work as an act of confession, or of conversation. She says simply, "Poetry is telling something to someone." According to her mentor, the distinguished poet Stanley Kunitz, Howe's 'telling' is "luminous, intense, eloquent." Part of the urgency and importance of Howe's work stems from its rootedness in real life. Just ten minutes into her 1987 residence at the MacDowell Colony, Howe received a call from her brother John telling her that her mother had had a heart attack. Two years later, John died of AIDS, and her book "What the Living Do" is, in large part, an elegy to him. It was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the five best books of poetry published
in 1997.


Howe went on to co-edit "In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic." Howe's poetry is intensely intimate, and her bravery in laying bare the music of her own pain is part of its resonance. Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, and poet and novelist Margaret Atwood named Howe's first collection, "The Good Thief," for the National Poetry Series. She has, in addition, been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.


Currently, Howe teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and at New York University.


McCann has been instrumental in making poetry that speaks to the AIDS crisis and gay relationships. His work has been included in "In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic" and "The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories."


His most recent collection of poems, "Ghost Letters," received the Beatrice Hawley prize and the Capricorn Poetry Award.


McCann's poems narrate a haunted world. The titles of his collections-"Ghost Letters," "Dream of the Traveler" and "Nights of 1990"-point to this poignant mixture of presence and absence, of imagination and fierce, unblinking reality. Poet Jean Valentine writes, "... McCann writes not about, but from, his losses. We listen to his ghosts and they are ours also."


While the evocation of memory and death fills McCann's poems with phantoms, both personal and cultural, it is undeniably focused on the body. Fiercely passionate and deeply elegiac, his poems are, as Mark Doty writes, "posted from the zone where mortality and desire intersect."


McCann also has a deeply rooted sense of place. He was born in Maryland and has spent the majority of his life in the mid-Atlantic region, co-editing "Landscape and Distance: Contemporary Poets from Virginia." Currently, he lives in Washington D.C., where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program at American University.


Howe and McCann's reading is sponsored by the Poetry Center, funded by the Edith Oppenheimer Richman '31 Fund, and will be followed by a bookselling and signing. For more information, call Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.

-30-


..............................................................................................................................................................

News Release Directory // News Office Home Page // Smith College Home Page

© 2001 Smith College // Please send comments to:
webmaster@smith.edu.
Page maintained by the Office of College Relations.