Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

Peter Matthiessen, major American writer and former New York State Author under the auspices of
the New York State Writers Institute (1995-1997) has died at the age of 86.

Here's the New York Times obituary:   http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/peter-matthiessen-author-and-naturalist-is-dead-at-86.html?_r=0

 

More about Matthiessen as State Author appointed by then-Governor Mario Cuomo:

http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/matsnsa.html

Picture:  Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William Kennedy and UAlbany President Karen Hitchcock at the Writers Institute's 1995 New York State Author and Poet awards ceremony.

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Poetry for Farmers and Retired Roofers

Elizabeth Floyd Mair has a wonderful interview with Vermont poet laureate Syd Lea (who visits Tues.) in Sunday's Times Union:

Q: You've written that if you picture an audience in your mind at all as you write, it's your Vermont hill farm neighbors, who, you note, would never elect to read a word of your poetry. Why write for them?

A: I have a feeling that too much poetry since the era of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot sends this message, whether subliminally or not: "Hey, you can't come in here; you haven't learned the language that we insiders use." One of the reasons I so admire Robert Frost is that any reader — from a first-grader to a graduate student to a farmer to a labor organizer — can get something out of his poems. Those poems are scarcely simple-minded; indeed they are profoundly complex. But complexity is not the same as complication.

Imagining that my beloved 90-year-old neighbor — not a farmer, but a retired roofer — might read a poem of mine and get something out of it too — keeps me from erring toward mere complication.

Read more here: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/The-nature-of-words-4809616.php#photo-5177268

Read more about Lea's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_lea13.html

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A Poem by Sydney Lea, Who Visits Tuesday, Sept. 17

Bestselling food writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), calls Sydney Lea “as fine a companion on the page as American writing about nature has to offer.” Indeed,  Lea is widely regarded as the Robert Frost of his generation.

Lea visits this Tuesday to share the lectern with poet Marie Howe.

More about their visit here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_lea13.html

Much of Lea's poetry is inspired by the natural world and rural Vermont settings. Here's an example, "Cooking by Waters:  An Non-Elegy," which appears on his website. The poem was first published in the Hudson Review, Autumn 2008.

The birch’s skin curls up like an ancient letter.

The sweet smoke makes my breathing harder.

On a streamside fir three goldfinches teeter.

Late sun makes a tumult along their feathers.

In an hour the hermit thrush will have begun.

I accept the bittersweet gift of the weather in fall.

The air’s so clear the only haze is inward.

How did I learn these names and calls?

I can’t be sure. They simply gathered.

 

Read more of the poem here: http://sydneylea.net (click on "Sampler").

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Alison Lurie on the Magic of Knitting in the New Yorker

Alison Lurie, New York State Author (2012-14) by appointment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute, contributes a piece on knitting to the New Yorker blog:

"As a child, I thought of knitting as a kind of magic, in which a one-dimensional object became two-dimensional or even three-dimensional. While you watched, a very long piece of string somehow turned into a hat or a sock or a mitten, something with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands in fairy tales. "

"It wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The people who could perform this magic seemed, in everyday life, to be everyday humans. But when they picked up their wands they turned into sorceresses or fairy godmothers, mistresses of a secret art."

More in the New Yorker:   http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/history-of-knitting-in-literature-sweater-curse.html

More on Alison Lurie:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison12.html

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Hillary Clinton's 1969 Commencement Speech at Wellesley

Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate, who reads July 5th at the New York State Summer
Writers Institute in Saratoga, remembers Hillary Clinton's commencement speech at Wellesley, which he attended as a young poetry professor. The piece appeared yesterday in Slate:

"What was amazing, and not standard, was the gift for rising to an occasion: a political gift and a matter of talent surging toward its realization. As part of the prepared part of her speech, Hillary Rodham read a poem by a classmate, a composition also touchingly of that era. On that day in May, in other words, the notes that were struck may have been unremarkable, but the occasion was like hearing a very young, uniquely gifted musician play: something in the sheer, expressive command—a word used about athletes, as well as musicians—was extraordinary, unmistakable, and already formed."

More: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/07/hillary_clinton_wesleyan_commencement_speech_robert_pinsky_on_the_politician.html

Full schedule of free summer events:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/sumread.html

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Poet Sharon Olds at the Writers Institute in 2004

Here's a YouTube video of new 2013 Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former New York State Poet Laureate Sharon Olds with poet Edward Hirsch at the Writers Institute in 2004. She confesses: "I tend to write a lot. Most of it's bad. That just how it is for me." But she adds that the fact that she doesn't need to show a poem to anyone gives her a certain freedom to write what she wants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut97FMOY7M8&feature=youtu.be

More about their joint visit:

http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/olds_sharon-and-hirsch_edward.html

Olds served as the official State Poet under our sponsorship 1998-2000.

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Marie Howe: The Poetry of Eating

"This waiter came in, and we were served 10 courses, or something, of the most extraordinary food. It was like, ‘This course is comprised of April breeze on pond water,’ and ‘This next course will be summer night, half-moon, ocean water.’ And every single bite was exquisite. By the end, I was drunk on food. I was drunk on love. We were in love with the waiter. We were practically licking him. I was in love with the world because of food. I have never known anything like it in my life.”

Read more of our own New York State Poet laureate Marie Howe's restaurant review of The French Laundry in the New York Times:  http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/a-poet-at-the-french-laundry/?smid=tw-nytdining

Read more about Marie Howe here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_marie12.html

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Alison Lurie: The day I threw away fashion

Alison Lurie, Pulitzer-winning novelist, will be inaugurated as NYS Author on 9/20 at Page Hall. A scholar of fashion and avid clothes shopper, Lurie tells The Guardian about abandoning fashion at the age of 60 when fashion abandoned her.

The day I threw away fashion

When she hit 60 Alison Lurie realised that fashion no longer spoke to her. So she got rid of half her wardrobe, stopped colouring her hair, gave up wearing makeup - and felt euphoric

 

Soon after I reached 60 I was abandoned by Vogue magazine and all its clones. Like former lovers who drop you slowly and politely because they once cared for you, they gradually stopped speaking to me. Without intending it I had permanently alienated them, simply by becoming old. From their point of view, I was now a hopeless case. They were not going to show me any more pictures of clothes I might look good in, or give me useful advice about makeup or hair.   More.

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Marie Howe: On adopting a child

Many of Marie Howe's recent poems and writings explore her experiences as the single mother of her daughter Grace Yi-Nan Howe. A single mother, Howe was in her fifties when she elected to adopt Grace from China in 2003.

"Three weeks in three Chinese cities (bicycles, smog, scorpions, SARS, an appendicitis attack), Yi-Nan sobbing throughout the fifteen-hour flight, and we were back in New York, slumped in a cab speeding through the rainy night." More in New York magazine.

Our new State Poet, Howe will be inaugurated along with State Author Alison Lurie on September 20 in Page Hall on the University at Albany downtown campus, 135 Western Ave.

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That Paradoxical Thing: A Bestselling Poet

Marie Howe's interview with NPR's Terry Gross on Fresh Air in October 2011 briefly elevated her to the paradoxical status of "bestselling poet." For at least a month afterward, her books sold like hot cakes, according to W. W. Norton, her publisher. The program was rebroadcast in April 2012.

"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," Howe told Terry Gross. "The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that."

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Marie Howe is New York's new Poet Laureate (2012-14), named by Governor Andrew Cuomo under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute. She will be inaugurated along with State Author Alison Lurie on Thursday, Sept 20 at 8PM at Page Hall on the UAlbany downtown campus.

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Disguising Ithaca

Alison Lurie, our new State Author who will be inaugurated at Page Hall on Thursday 9/20, talks to the Gannett new service about disguising her hometown of Ithaca, NY and Cornell University, her longtime employer, in her novels:

“I called it a different name because if I wanted to move the buildings around, it wouldn’t be so difficult,” Lurie said. “And I didn’t want people to say, ‘What professor is this?’ Of course, they did anyway. But I tried so hard not to make it anyone I knew.”

More.

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Russell Banks at the Adirondack Center

Former New York State Author Russell Banks (2004-2006) will read from his acclaimed new novel about the lives of sex offenders at Paul Smiths College on Thursday Sept. 13th.

“Destined to be a canonical novel of its time... it delivers another of Banks’s wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life, and this one very particular to the early 21st century... Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear.” (Janet Maslin, New York Times )

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Our New Alison Lurie Page

Visit our new page for Alison Lurie, who will visit us on Thursday, September 20th to be inaugurated as New York's newest "Author Laureate," serving as New York State Author 2012-14 by executive order of Andrew Cuomo under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute.

"Alison Lurie, is celebrated for witty and satirical novels that examine middle class American life, particularly in small northeastern college towns inspired by Ithaca, New York (where she has lived since 1961), and on the campuses of colleges inspired by Cornell University (where she taught from 1968 until her retirement as the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature in 1998)."

"For her nuanced understanding and lifelike portrayal of social customs and the relationships between the sexes, Lurie is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters. Over the course of ten novels and half a century she has held a mirror up to people of her own generation as they navigate their lives."   More.

Picture from The Guardian.

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Marie Howe, New NY State Poet, reads a poem

Here's a video clip of our new State Poet Marie Howe reading her poem "Star Market" during her last visit to the Writers Institute in 2008. Howe will be inaugurated and will read from her work at UAlbany on September 20th.

The poem was first published in the New Yorker in January 2008.

The Star Market

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/01/14/080114po_poem_howe#ixzz259WQ51xu

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State Author and Poet to Open Fall Writers Series

NEW YORK STATE AUTHOR AND POET AWARDS AND READING
Alison Lurie, New York State Author 2012-2014 and Marie Howe, New York State Poet 2012-2014
September 20 (Thursday)
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Alison Lurie is celebrated for witty novels that examine middle class American life, particularly in small college towns inspired by Ithaca, New York. For her nuanced understanding and lifelike portrayal of social customs and relationships between the sexes, Lurie is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters. Over the course of ten novels and half a century she has held a mirror up to people of her own generation as they navigate romance, marriage, parenthood, divorce, reconciliation, and advancing age. Her major novels include Truth and Consequences (2005), Foreign Affairs (1984), which received the Pulitzer Prize, The War Between the Tates (1974), and Love and Friendship (1962).
Marie Howe’s prize-winning poetry seeks answers to perplexing questions about life and death in ordinary moments and day-to-day experiences. As a teacher and poet, she searches for meaning and redemption in suffering and loss. She helped many come to terms with grief during the AIDS epidemic by writing compassionately about the loss of her brother to that disease, and by encouraging those impacted by AIDS to find their voices and be published. Her poetry collections include The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), What the Living Do (1997), and The Good Thief (1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. She also has received the Lavan Younger Poets Prize of the American Academy of Poets.

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Former US Poet Laureate Charles Simic tomorrow

Charles Simic reads tomorrow at Skidmore with writer Danzy Senna.

His 1999 poem, "Fork," was featured last week in a Slate article on the peculiar history of that utensil.

This strange thing must have crept  

Right out of hell.

It resembles a bird’s foot

Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:  

Its head which like your fist

Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Tuesday, July 17th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Former US Poet Laureate Mark Strand in Saratoga

Poet Mark Strand, whose poetry was praised for its "transparent verbal perfection" by Octavio Paz, the late Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate, will share the stage with poet and memoirist Honor Moore this coming Monday, July 16th,  8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

Honor Moore, author of poetry, fiction and nonfiction is perhaps best known for her bestselling memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, about her relationship with her secretly gay father, leading Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, Jr.
All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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