THE RUSKIN ART CLUB PRESENTS: A LECTURE/READING BY U.S POET LAUREATE ROBERT PINSKY
• Lecture followed by reception; Q&A moderated by Lynne Thompson
• The event is free of charge for Ruskin Art Club members/Mount Saint Mary students & faculty
• $10 general admission / $5 for students and seniors
• Free parking
For further information, visit our Ruskin Art Club Group on Facebook.
John Ruskin’s lecture “The Work of Iron in Nature, Art, and Policy” formulates a characteristic element of modernism in American poetry that is also a vitalizing tenet of American democracy: that purity is inert, while mixing is alive. Ruskin’s praise of rust and other forms of oxidation is consistent with, and possibly a source for, the celebration of hybrids, improvisations, and fluidities in poems by William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Robert Pinsky will talk on this topic in an informal, improvised way.
Award-winning poet, translator, essayist, teacher and cultural commentator, ROBERT PINSKY served as United States Poet Laureate for an unprecedented three terms (1997-2000). Pinsky’s landmark best-selling translation of Dante’s Inferno received the LA Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. His newest book is a collection of poetry entitled At the Foundling Hospital (2016). Pinsky frequently performs his poems with eminent jazz musicians and is the author of several opera libretti. His Tanner Lectures at Princeton in 2002 were published as Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry and his Campbell lectures at Rice University (2009) were issued as Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.