MCC’s Creative Arts Committee Presents
Stephen Dobyns, Visiting Poet
- Thursday, October 14, 7-8:30 p.m., Monroe A: Reading and Book-Signing, Free and Open to the Public
- Friday, October 15, 12 p.m., 8-200: Discussion and Workshop, Free and Open to the MCC Community
Stephen Dobyns is a highly-acclaimed writer whose works include twelve volumes of poetry, twenty-one books of fiction (including his popular “Saratoga” detective novels), and one non-fiction book about poetry. His awards include the Lamont Poetry Selection, the National Poetry Series Prize, and the Melville Cane Award. Although Dobyns has been writing for over forty years, his recent books retain a freshness and vigor one associates with younger writers. This comes in part from the unique blend of humor and sincerity that marks all of his writing. As many critics have observed, Dobyns’s poems begin with familiars, often citing common figures of speech as triggers that lead to full-blown meditations on perennial themes—life, love, death, art. His method accommodates “low” and “high” matter, itself subjected to modes of development that are alternately logical and absurd. Dobyns achieves great heights through a sustained casualness of tone and a deft handling of form: his poems read at first like transcriptions of mildly-interesting monologues in long, prosy lines without stanza breaks; but they are in fact artful constructions that reveal the subtle affects of line and architectonic skill. Winter’s Journey, his most recent book of poems, shows Dobyns once again embracing these procedures in ways that allow him to continue and extend his voice to accommodate a more forthright political awareness.
For further questions about Dobyns’s visit, contact Tony Leuzzi at aleuzzi@monroecc.edu.
Tony Leuzzi
English/Philosophy
10/06/2010 |