The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri 63108 ; 314-754-1850
For immediate release
St. Louis, MO – The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce a night of poetry and discussion on Wednesday, April 18th at 7pm. This event has been co-organized with the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Panelists will include the writers Mary Jo Bang, Peter Campion, Geoff Dyer, and Raphael Rubinstein.
Poets have often responded to visual art in their own writings, variously paying homage to the beauty of an artwork, analyzing the role of art in human affairs, or attempting to understand their own aesthetic by puzzling over an artist’s. The resulting writings are known as ekphrastic poems. Many such poems begin as a tribute or as a way to explore a writer’s reactions to visual art, but end with the creation of a whole new aesthetic experience.
The current exhibition at the Pulitzer, Portrait/Homage/Embodiment, represents a particularly rich opportunity to explore the dialogues that occur not only between art objects and poems, but between visual artists and writers. To that end, art critics and poets have been invited to the Pulitzer to talk and write about the exhibition in the context of poetry. The collaboration has purposely been left open-ended. The writers may muse on the relationship between a reader and speaker in a poem versus a viewer and art object in a museum, or on the parallels between visual and poetic portraits. One example involves the current interest in contemporary poetry and painting to explore whether an authentic self exists. Whatever subjects these preeminent writers broach, they will be sure to add to the ongoing and animated analysis of the relationship between these art forms.
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine and one of the largest literary organizations in the world, exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.
The Pulitzer aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of art and architecture. With the works of art themselves, along with programs, collaborations and exchanges with other cultural and educational institutions, the Pulitzer is a resource for artists, architects, scholars, students and the general public. The Pulitzer is located at 3716 Washington Blvd., St. Louis, MO, 63108, Telephone 314.754.1850, www.pulitzerarts.org.
About the Writers
Mary Jo Bang is the author of four books of poems, including Louise in Love and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon. Her fifth collection, ELEGY, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in October 2007. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Paris Review, Fence, Verse, and elsewhere. She's been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis where she is an Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program.
Peter Campion is the author of a book of poems, Other People and a monograph on the painter Mitchell Johnson. His poems and prose appear regularly in publications such as ArtNews, The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, Poetry, Sculpture, Slate, and The Yale Review. He teaches at Washington College in Maryland.
Geoff Dyer is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes; and four genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award) , Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and, most recently, The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography). He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, in 2005 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in London.
Raphael Rubenstein is the author of a collection of poems, The Basement of the Cafe Rilke; a book of autobiographical prose, Postcards from Alphaville; and Polychrome Profusion: Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002, all published by Hard Press Editions. A new collection of poems, The Afterglow of Minor Pop Masterpieces, is forthcoming from Make Now Press. His poetry has appeared in many publications, including Grand Street, American Poetry Review, and The Oulipo Compendium. Other books include En Quête de Miracle: Cinquante épisodes extraits des annales de l’art contemporain translated by Marcel Cohen, a translation of Cohen’s In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura, and the recent anthology Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice. He is also the co-author of monographs on Norman Bluhm and Claude Viallat. He has been writing about contemporary art since 1986, mostly for Art in America, where he is a Senior Editor. He is also on the faculty of the MFA in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2002, the French government presented him with the award of Chevalier dans l’Order des Arts et des Lettres.
