Tuesday, January 19, 2010

February 16: The Wallace Stevens Anthology

Ordinary Evening takes its name from a poem by Wallace Stevens, so we were thrilled to learn of Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens, edited by Dennis Barone and James Finnegan. This is the first anthology of poems by a full range of poets, inspired by Stevens's life and work. We are fortunate to have five of them read from the collection on February 16th.

Dennis Barone’s recent books are Precise Machine and North Arrow . In 2006 he edited Furnished Rooms , poems by early twentieth-century poet Emanuel Carnevali. He has published a collection of selected poems, and in 1997 he received the America Award in fiction for Echoes. He is Director of American Studies at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut.

James Finnegan has published poems in Ploughshares, Poetry East, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review & other literary magazines. He started an internet discussion list related to contemporary poetry called New-Poetry. He cofounded the web-radio project LitStation.com and he posts aphoristic musings to ursprache, a poetics blog. He lives in West Hartford, CT, and works as an insurance underwriter of financial institutions risk.

Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His poems have been published in such journals as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and Mandorla, as well as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. His book of poems is Let's Not Call it Consequence. With Nancy Kuhl, he edits Phylum Press. He is a lecturer at Yale University and the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading.

Susan Howe is the author of several books including Souls of the Labadie Tract, The Midnight, Kidnapped, The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems, Pierce-Arrow, and Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979. Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History , which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson.

Clare Rossini’s second collection, Lingo, was released in 2006. Her first full-length collection, Winter Morning with Crow, was selected for the 1996 Akron Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, as well as in textbooks and anthologies, including Poets for the New Century, An Introduction to Poetry, and Best American Poetry. Rossini is currently on the faculty of Trinity College in Hartford and the MFA program at Vermont College in Montpelier, VT.