- March 26, 2002
- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Poet Stanley Kunitz to Read
at Smith College
NORTHAMPTON, Mass.-The Poetry Center
at Smith College will present poet Stanley Kunitz at 7:30 p.m.
on Tuesday, April 16, in Wright Hall Auditorium. The event is
free and open to the public.
Called by many "a living legend," Kunitz has published
12 books of poetry in the last 70 years. He served as poet laureate
of the United States for 2000 and 2001 and at the age of 96 is
considered one of America's most important and lasting voices.
Founder of both the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and
Poets House in New York City, Kunitz' myriad honors include the
Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for "Selected Poems: 1928-1958,"
the Bollingen Prize in 1987, the National Medal of Arts in 1993
and the National Book Award in 1995 for "Passing Through:
Later Poems, New and Selected."
Born in 1905 in Worcester, Mass., Kunitz graduated summa cum
laude from Harvard University in 1926 and received his master's
degree from Harvard in 1927. His first book, "Intellectual
Things," was published by Doubleday in 1930; his second
book, "Passport to the War," came out more than a decade
later in 1944. Besides his many books of poetry, he has written
essays, edited reference books for H.W.Wilson and translated
writers Voznesensky, Akhmatova and others.
Kunitz has astonished the literary world by getting only better
with age. Carolyn Forché calls him "a living treasure."
Of Kunitz' later poems, David Barber of The Atlantic Monthly
writes, "They are, in all their outward simplicity and inward
mystery, perhaps the closest that American poetry has come in
our time to achieving and urgency and aura that deserve-even
demand-to be called visionary."
Kunitz lives in New York City and in Provincetown, Mass., where
he tends his famous garden.
Kunitz' reading will be followed by a bookselling and signing.
For more information, call Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center
office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director,
at (413) 585-3368.
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