The next presentation in the series will feature Denny Moers and will take place on Tuesday, 21 October at 5:30 in the McCormack Family Theater, 70 Brown Street (room 132). The program will open with Brecht Gander givng a short reading from his parent's poetry.
Though her work is deeply connected to the Ozarks, Wright spent significant periods in New York and San Francisco before moving in 1983 to Rhode Island, where she taught at Brown University. With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she ran Lost Roads Publishers for over 20 years. Among her honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Robert Creeley Award, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
“Poetry is a necessity of life,” Wright said. “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.”
Keith Waldrop, recipient of the National Book Award in Poetry in 2009 for his trilogy, Transcendental Studies, died on Thursday, 27 July 2023. Keith had retired from Brown University as Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature in 2011, where he had taught for just over 40 years.
While foremost a poet, Waldrop was also a distinguished translator, earning the rank of Chevalier of Arts and Letters from the French government. His translations ranged the gamut of French poetry – with highly-regarded translations of canonical writers Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine, but also delivering to an English-speaking audience luminous renderings of his French contemporaries Anne-Marie Albiach, Jean Grosjean, Jacques Roubaud and Claude Royet-Journoud. He also published two books of prose, Hegel’s Family (a collection of short pieces) and Light While There is Light, a memoir in novel form, depicting an altogether eccentric American childhood, an Odyssey in its own right, told in deadpan manner with precise timing — a memory piece haunted by ghosts and filled with readerly pleasures.
With co-editors James Camp and D.C. Hope, Keith founded Burning Deck, a literary journal wherein the hope was to create a space that might bridge the gap between the various poetic camps. After four issues, the journal transformed into a book press, and Camp and Hope moved on while Rosmarie Waldrop joined as co-editor. The press ran from 1961 to 2017 and published over 200 titles.
Denny Moers (2025 presenter)
The American poet, Charles Olson described the process of composing poetry as an open field; words forming their meaning directly and concretely on this ‘landscape made of paper’. I have always felt the visual experience as collaboration with this open field; sensitized to everything I could bring to it and receive from it through the interaction of light, chemistry, film and paper.
Moers has had over 50 solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and his work is in numerous public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston & Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Bibliothèque National Museum in Paris. Moers has published two monographs: Figments of a Landscape and In the Ultra Silent Light. Moers is a recipient of the Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts, and a four time winner of the RI Fellowship in Photography.
Denny Moers has collaborated with poets on over 30 book covers including seven for C.D. Wright. Between Now & Then, a portfolio consisting of ten book covers and poetry selected by C.D. Wright. Casting Deep Shade, was a collaboration on the Beech Trees of Rhode Island followed by an exhibition with Brecht and Forrest Gander held at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Brown University. A film by the same title was made by David H. Wells.