Author and Poet Stephen Dobyns to Read at Smith College

The Poetry Center at Smith College presents poet Stephen Dobyns at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 24, in Stoddard Auditorium.

Dobyns has published 21 works of fiction; a book of essays on poetry, "Best Words, Best Order" (St. Martin's Press, 1996); and ten books of poems, most recently "Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides." His most recent novels are "Boy in the Water" and "Church of Dead Girls." A collection of his short stories, "Eating Naked," is forthcoming from Holt this year.

Dobyns' poems have won many awards and prizes, including the Lamont Poetry Selection, the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award and Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His novels have been translated into some 15 languages, and two of them have been made into films ("Cold Dog Soup" and "Two Deaths of Señora Puccini"). Whether working in prose or poetry, he is a storyteller of great playfulness, caustic wit and heartfelt tenderness -- provocative and deeply curious.

In "Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides," we see the world through the melancholic eyes of Heart -- blood-pumping organ, lover, poet and skeptical philosopher of the everyday. Heart reflects on the vagaries of love, the cruelties of time and on "how some folks get pearls, others pebbles." Dividing two sections of Heart poems is the long "Oh, Immobility, Death's Vast Associate," which is a jazzy disquisition on human isolation and inaction in the midst of a planet full of people brooding over problems of gravity, age and memory. Full of Dobyns' characteristic black humor and maniacal imagination, the poem also admits moments of irresistible affirmation:

But the flower, the poem, the sonata, the song:
all beauty is a form of eager activity. Within
its delicate body each daisy is a rowdy dance.

"Pallbearers" has been called "a cycle of medieval morality poems for a new Dark Age."

"Stephen Dobyns is nothing so much as the Dean Swift of contemporary American poetry," writes The Washington Post. "Satirist and absurdist, unsparing chronicler of the body's runaway appetites and the body politic's rampant festerings, a searing moralist camouflaged in a manic style and a flair for the macabre." But, as Hayden Carruth said, while "his manner is tart, often sardonic,.at heart the poems are profoundly humane," struggling as they always are with the paradox of the human condition: "How hard to love the world; we must love the world."

Dobyns' reading will be followed by a bookselling and signing. For more information, contact Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413) 585-3368.

Contact: Marti Hobbes, mhobbes@smith.edu

October 10, 2000