Rosanna Warren's new poetry volume, Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), contains a long poem, "Earthworks," that pays homage to the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York City's Central Park, and of Albany's Washington Park:
....The Park The Central
Park The central idea that all--
ward heelers, dandies, urchins, freed slaves, desperadoes,
gents and ladies, the halt, the swift, the lame--
might come, might be drawn forth in courtesy, might
harmonize Democracy is space in which we flow....
Friday, April 8, 2011
A Poem for Spring in Albany
Rosanna Warren on Arthur Rimbaud
Poet Rosanna Warren, who visits the Writers Institute on Tuesday, April 12, talks about Rimbaud's revolutionary impact on the art of poetry in The Atlantic, October 21, 2008:
"[H]e radically reinvented the idea of love, even as he pioneered two major experimental forms of poetry, the prose poem and free verse (vers libre).
By the time he was nineteen, this astonishing adolescent had mastered and then assaulted the classical beauty of the Alexandrine line—the central building block of French verse—and he had broken through into realms of erotic and psychic experience for which his culture scarcely had no language. So he invented one." More.
Ben Katchor in downtown Albany this Sunday
MacArthur Award-winning cartoonist Ben Katchor will give a free slideshow presentation at the Albany Institute of History and Art this weekend (Sunday at 2PM).
Katchor's newest collection, The Cardboard Valise, was published last month (the book comes in rather unusual cardboard valise-shaped package).
Adam Sternbergh of the New York Times said: "[T]he appearance of a new Katchor collection is always reason to celebrate, so let’s start celebrating.... Katchor is a true, rare, untarnished New York treasure — the kind of artist who can concoct a fantastical made-up world, but one that ensures you’ll never see the real world in quite the same way again." More.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Shanly on the TU Movies Blog
C. J. Lais has an ethusiastic piece about John Patrick Shanley's visit later today on the Times Union's Movies Blog: "Suppose you write a play that wins the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Awards, Drama Desk Awards and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, then adapt that work into a screenplay to a film that you direct to five Academy Awards. Think you might be qualified to speak about writing and movies? Say hello to John Patrick Shanley, creator of “Doubt.” Literally, say hello to him today at the University at Albany when he gives an afternoon seminar and an evening lecture as part of the New York State Writers Institute Spring 2011 Visiting Writers Series." More.
Read More......
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
TU interview with John Patrick Shanley
Elizabeth Mair's interview with John Patrick Shanley, who visits the Writers Institute on Wednesday April 6, appeared in Sunday's Times Union.
Picture: Shanley with Meryl Streep at a screening party for Doubt at the Motion Pictures Academy.
Mair /Times Union: You've said that your childhood in the Bronx involved "constant fistfights." Why was that?
A: It was an Irish and Italian neighborhood -- probably more Irish than Italian -- and the Irish like to fight.
Q: Yourself included?
A: I was in fistfights from the time that I was 6 years old. Usually a couple of times a week. It was like a job.
Q: What would you fight for?
A: I was fighting to defend myself, for the most part. I didn't start spontaneously hitting people until later. Until I was about 15, I had to be hit first.
Q: In your Oscar acceptance for "Moonstruck," you thanked all the people who had ever punched or kissed you --
A: "Everybody who ever punched me or kissed me, and everybody who I ever punched or kissed."
Q: I understand the kiss part, but why the punch part?
A: Well, it's contact. It's somebody reaching out to you -- or for you. And it's a form of sincerity. More.
Read More......
John Patrick Shanley Visits Tomorrow
Here's a great New York Times profile from 2008 of Oscar and Tony-winner John Patrick Shanley (who visits the Writers Institute, Wednesday April 6, 2011): "A former marine and the son of an Irish immigrant father from County Westmeath, he has a lot of other prosaic credits in his résumé, including working as a locksmith, a bartender and an elevator operator. He is, in conversation and approach, very much a product of the kind of hard-knocks Roman Catholic primary school that frames the moral dilemma of 'Doubt.'" More. Shanley will deliver the 15th Annual Burian Lecture cosponsored by the Theatre Department and the Jarka and Grayce Burian Endownment.
UAlbany Alum Stephen Adly Guirgis on Broadway
Playwright and UAlbany alum Stephen Adly Guirgis, frequent collaborator with Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, and one of the leading dramatists of his generation, makes his Broadway debut with the new play, "The Motherf****r with the Hat," which opens April 11th at the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre. Guirgis visited the Writers last April 12, 2010. Here's a video clip.
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