http://www.barnesfoundation.org/events/opening/

Carolyne Wright, Rhonda Pettit and Pauletta Hansel will read as  part of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s Poetry in the  Garden Series on Tuesday, April 24 at 7pm.. The series starts tonight!!  This week’s readers include Karen George, a winner of this year’s poetry contest.  Visit http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/news/2012/poetry.html for details.

On Saturday, April 21 1:30- 4:30 pm Grailville hosts award winning poet, Carolyne Wright  presenting Poetry and Public Life-Writing as Witness. As poets and writers,  we might not consider our work as a public act. Yet poetry has always been a mode of truth-telling–even more so now, given the conditions of political,  social, environmental and ethical extremity that prevail in this new  millennium.

What does it mean to connect our writing to our public lives as  citizens–to working for cultural, social, political, and environmental  change as well as inner transformation?  Seattle-based poet, translator and  teacher Carolyne Wright, author of Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene will  lead an exploration into the work and lives of some poets who have managed a  larger public presence and contribution from within intensely committed  writing lives, facilitate participants’ hands-on mapping of our own writing  lives within our communities, and a discussion of new ways that writing can  bear witness in the world. Carolyne’s awards include the American Book Award  from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 2007 Independent Book Publishers  Bronze Award for Poetry. She is on the faculty of the Northwest Institute of  Literary Arts’ Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program and Seattle’s Richard  Hugo House. We are offering an “early-bird” price of $30 for this three hour  workshop; $40 with an optional 12:30 lunch. (The “day-of” price is $40 without lunch) Scholarships are also available.Registration at grailville.org or by calling 513-683-2340.

Publication date: May 1, 2012
Nightboat Books; Distributed by UPNE (www.upne.com)
Paper │ $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-937658-02-1
6 x 9″ ‌│ 600 pages │ Poetry

A landmark volume gathering 45 years of work by one of our leading poets

From his early spare poems written in Spain to the recent ruminative work exploring language, tradition (often Jewish and diasporic) and the self, this book collects four decades of Michael Heller’s “tone perfect poems” as George Oppen described them. Enriched with the detailed landscapes of the phenomenal world and mind, This Constellation Is a Name confirms Michael Heller’s place at the forefront of contemporary American poetry.

If any readers of poetry doubt that eros and ethos are opposites that can only exist in each other’s mutual embrace, then Michael Heller’s This Constellation is a Name will come as genuine revelation. Seldom has the erotic gift of intimate portrayal coincided so fully with the ethical gift of objective attention.—Dan Beachy-Quick

a collected poems like this offers is the revelation of a life of poetry and what such a life can mean in discovering and creating the details of a world too often hidden from us by its legislated realities. In this pursuit Michael Heller takes his place alongside “Objectivist” predecessors like Williams and Oppen, to emerge here as the conduit of personal and historical memories and visions that make a rich and needed composition for his time and ours. He stands in this with the very best among us. —Jerome Rothenberg

“To conceive otherwise,” says Michael Heller, is the poet’s essential task, to which he has apprenticed himself for nearly fifty years. No matter if the poem is brief or extended, the line long or short, the setting Manhattan or the Colorado Rockies, a lost Bialystok or an imagined Tibet—what arises from the page is an action of mind, an asking, questing trajectory, tracked with uncanny surety by movement of the poetic line. This is no language-locked adventure, but an impassioned, ethical listening to the mind—and the world—at work in words. —Susan Tichy

Full-throated praise for this remarkable accomplishment, a generous tome of over a half century’s life and astute consciousness in poetry. Michael Heller is one of our best poets and thinkers who has carried Oppen’s dictum that poetry embodies “precise information on existence” forward. His erudition and scope astound: Jewish mysticism finds company with Baudelaire and Tibet His modes are various and true, and constellate fully realized an experimental/ philosophical/profound Lyric. —Anne Waldman

Ryan Writers Series presents

Henry Weinfield

Thursday, March 22^nd, 8:00

Conaton Learning Commons 413

Poet, critic, and translator, Henry Weinfield is a Professor in the Program for Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  His new book is A Wandering Aramaen, from Cincinnati’s own Dos Madres Press. He is also the author of Without Mythologies: New & Selected Poems & Translations(Dos Madres Press, 2008), The Sorrows of Eros and Other Poems (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) and of three other collections of poetry. His translations include Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony (University of Michigan Press) and the Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé(University of California Press, 1995).   He has also written two critical studies, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History(Southern Illinois UP, 1991) and The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk (University of Iowa Press, 2009). His study of the blank-verse tradition in English poetry from Milton to Stevens is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

“A poet of exquisite formal control, Henry Weinfield writes lyrical and narrative poems that have a rich, sad music for which the ear and the heart hunger. This is a poetry to provoke and console, a poetry that has many roots in the Classical and Hebraic traditions and that combines and extends both in a unique way. His translations are superb, marking a level of achievement above that of all other American translators of European lyric poetry.”
– Kevin Hart

“Henry Weinfield’s poems startle us with their formal beauty and mesmerizing cadence. Their intense clarity is at once moving and richly polyvalent. Legacies abound, from the Metaphysicals through Mallarmé and on to Stevens and Bronk. Weinfield writes that “to be is but the form of to desire.” With immaculate diction and often biting wit, these poems exhibit an almost paradisical perfection of that desiring.”
– Michael Heller

March 22—New York: Book launch for Soutine will be at Swifts Hibernian Lounge at 7:00 pm. The venue is located at 34 East 4th Street, New York, NY (212) 227 9438. More information on the Swifts reading is forthcoming.

Attendance at both events is free. The New Jersey event shall adjourn to St. James Gate, a wonderful Irish bar just down the street. Swifts, itself, is a bar and restaurant—the event will take place in the back room, which has a fine pulpit.

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=303359519725937&id=249473923441

http://www.bookstores.nyu.edu/events/

Tuesday March 13, 7-8, Book Court in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn,

163 Court Street (btw Dean and Pacific)

http://www.bookcourt.org/

Recorded at the exhibition of Paul Weingarten’s paintings, Ober Gallery, Kent, CT.