News from New York State Writers Institute

For more information contact: Suzanne Lance, 518-442-5620

Award-winning Poet Frank Bidart to Read From New Collection

NYS Writers Institute Events Week of April 21 - 25, 2008

ALBANY, NY (04/09/2008; 0959)(readMedia)-- Frank Bidart, Award-winning Poet, Winner of the “Paris Review’s” First Bernard F. Conners Award to Discuss New Work, April 24, 2008

Frank Bidart, Pulitzer-nominated poet known for work that explores the revelations of troubled minds, will read from his new collection, “Watching the Spring Festival” (2008) on Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 8:00 p.m. in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m. the author will present an informal seminar in Campus Center 375 on the uptown campus. The events, which are free and open to the public, are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute.

Frank Bidart, more than any contemporary American poet, is associated with the revelations of troubled minds, and with risk-taking adventures into the realm of vision and spirit. In 2007, Bidart received Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry. In making the award, the judges said, “Bidart’s poems—eerie, probing, sometimes shocking, always subtle—venture into psychic terrain left largely unmapped in contemporary poetry.”

Bidart’s newest collection, “Watching the Spring Festival: Poems” (2008), explores “the difficulties of finding transformation.” Known as a master of the long, or book-length poem, Bidart here writes in the short lyric form for the first time. The poems are preoccupied with the imminence of death, and feature such subjects as Marilyn Monroe, the Russian ballerina Ulanova, the ballet “Giselle,” and the 8th century Chinese Imperial Court as described by the poet Du Fu. Writing in “Booklist,” Ray Olson said, “Bidart’s first collection not dominated by one or more long narratives shows him concerned with the resonance of the old saw, ‘ars longa, vita brevis’.... Bidart is nonpareil.” In a starred review, “Publishers Weekly” called “Watching the Spring Festival,” “His most intimate and vulnerable book.”

Bidart’s other recent collections include “Star Dust” (2005), “Music Like Dirt” (2002), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “Desire” (1997), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award.

In a review of “Desire” that appeared in “People” magazine, David Lehman said, “Cementing his reputation as a poet of astonishing originality, Bidart revisits classical encounters—the aftermath of a battle described by Tacitus, an incestuous romance in Ovid—and fashions them into a poetic idiom uniquely his own.

Frank Bidart came to national attention in the 1970s with his collections, “Golden State” (1973) and “The Book of the Body” (1977). On the basis of those collections, “Newsweek” proclaimed Bidart, “a poet of uncommon intelligence and uncompromising originality.”

Bidart’s prizes include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Shelley Award, and the Paris Review’s first Bernard F. Conners Prize. In 2003, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

“The Lost City” to be Screened in April 25, 2008

“The Lost City” (U.S., 2005, 143 minutes, color, 35 mm, in English and Spanish with English subtitles, directed by Andy Garcia), will be shown on Friday, April 25, 2008, at 7:30 p.m. in Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, on the University at Albany’s downtown campus. Sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, the screening is free and open to the public.

Sixteen years in the making and based on a screenplay by the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante, this lavish epic follows the fortunes of Havana’s glitzy nightclub set during and after Castro’s revolution. Many critics view the film as a flawed masterpiece, a Cuban “Doctor Zhivago” intercut with spectacular cabaret performances, “a musical fever dream of ‘Paradise Lost’” (“The Seattle Times”).

For additional information contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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Poet Frank Bidart