Award-Winning Poets Eleanor Wilner and
Constance Merritt to Read at Smith

The Poetry Center at Smith College presents poets Eleanor Wilner and Constance Merritt at 7:30 p.m.Tuesday, November 28, in the Nielson Library Browsing Room. The event is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.

Poet, translator, scholar and activist Eleanor Wilner has received many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1991-1996). Her fifth and most recent collection, "Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems," is a remarkable rewriting of the myths of life and art by one of the most vital and original voices in American poetry.

Committed to issues of peace and justice and known for what poet Alicia Ostriker has called "visionary amplitude and revolutionary intelligence," Wilner eschews the confessional mode and instead aims to give voice to the voiceless, to "reverse the spell" of greed, violence and fear. The poem's subjects -- the atomic bomb, the Valkyries, bats, goddesses, photography, the Bible, the politics of the body -- reflect their author's wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. And also her raucous sense of humor, as in "The Muse":

There she was, for centuries, the big
broad with the luscious tits, the secret
smile, a toga of translucent silk, cool
hand on the shoulder of the suffering
poet-the tease who made him
squeeze those great words out.

On the faculty of the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College since 1989, Wilner makes her home in Philadelphia, though she has been Visiting Writer in Hawaii, Iowa, and Japan, and is this year's Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Constance Merritt was born in Pine Bluff, Ark., and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Utah and a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln, where she currently resides.

Merritt is recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. Her first collection of poems, "A Protocol of Touch," was on the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and was published this year. Judge Eleanor Wilner called her "a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encountertender and austere, formal and intimate at once."

The reading will be followed by book selling 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, mhbbes@smith.edu, (413) 585-2190.

November 14, 2000