Boston University Creative Writing Faculty Reading

BU's Literary Lights Burn Bright

Creative Writing Program annual Faculty Reading tonight

Literature lovers, take note: tonight is a rare chance to hear excerpts from new novels by two prize-winning authors weeks before they hit bookstores, new poems by a three-time US poet laureate, and work from a young poet who's been called "the new breed of the modern conversationalist."

The annual BU Creative Writing Program Faculty Reading, being held at the Florence & Chafetz Hillel House, has become one of Boston's most popular literary events, attracting fans from across the Boston area.

Among those reading tonight are National Book Award winner Ha Jin, whose new novel, The Boat Rocker (Pantheon, 2016), is scheduled for release in May. A College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, Jin says the book is about "a case of artistic fraudulence after 9/11," in which a man has written a novel taking advantage of people's memories of the tragedy. Also on the roster is New York Times best-selling author Jennifer Haigh, a lecturer in the Creative Writing Program, whose new novel, Heat and Light (HarperCollins, 2016), explores the numerous ways one community is transformed by gas drilling.

Haigh, the author of the novel Baker Towers and the short story collection News from Heaven—both set in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town similar to the one she grew up in—says her new novel "looks at fracking from all sides: the guys working on the rigs, the CEO of a petroleum company, the environmental activist, the family farmers who lease their mineral rights believing they've won the lottery." She describes this latest work, which she will read from tonight, as "a big book with many moving parts."

"It always feels risky to read from brand-new work, to hear the words aloud for the first time," Haigh says. "The faculty reading is always a memorable night. I love hearing what my colleagues have been working on—especially the poets. Reading poetry is never as good as hearing it aloud."

The evening will feature work, old and new, from several poets. Robert Pinsky, US poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, says he may read some of the poems from his forthcoming collection, At the Foundling Hospital, to be published in October. "We teachers on this occasion become writers," he says. "We are interested to learn what our colleagues have been doing, happy to be presenting something to our students and to one another. I hope the evening might refresh, for all of us, a sense of the shared invention."

Other poets reading are Maggie Dietz (GRS'97), a University of Massachusetts Lowell assistant professor of English, who has returned to BU this semester as a lecturer, and Karl Kirchwey, a CAS professor of English, who plans to read from his forthcoming collection of poems, Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems. The poems were written between 2010 and 2014, while he was arts director at the American Academy in Rome.

Kirchwey sees the evening as an opportunity for faculty to impart some hard-won firsthand knowledge. "I hope the students who attend will have a chance to hear what we're working on, not so they can say, 'Gee, they're great,' but so they can understand that a reading is a chance to give the work on the page an aural/oral life and to test it out, making further revision possible."

In keeping with tradition, the event will also bring back a recent alum of the Creative Writing Program. Poet Michael Brokos (GRS'12) will read from poems in his book-length manuscript tentatively titled Blunt Force. Brokos describes the poems as "concerned with numbness, detachment, how we distance ourselves from our experiences, and how that removal continues to affect us."

Asked what attracted him to poetry initially, the poet says he's always "been drawn to the lyrical or musical qualities that underlie spoken language." He describes his style as "conversational (I owe a lot to poets such as Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery)," and as "relatively plain in the sense of not overly flashy or decorative." But at the same time, he says, his poems pay meticulous attention to "the musicality of speech or utterance."

"Mike's writing is unique," says Pinsky. "If understatement can be flamboyant, he embodies that quality. A plainness that somehow transforms into a bathysphere, going way down from a calm surface to the depths, and the creatures there."

Reflecting on his time at BU, Brokos says the MFA program was "hugely positive." The opportunity to workshop poems two or more times a week within "a dedicated community of practicing writers exposed me to a wide range of values and approaches," he says. "I was also able to try new things and gauge reactions in quick succession." More than anything, BU professors gave him a better understanding "of what a poem needs in order to hold together." He also says that being given the chance to design and teach creative writing courses at BU and Boston Arts Academy while he was in the program gave him an opportunity "to test my opinions and perspectives on what constitutes good and great writing."

Now an instructional coach at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches writing courses and workshops and manages the university's writing and tutoring center, Brokos urges students contemplating a career as a poet to spend as much time reading and writing poetry as possible, while not neglecting other avenues of learning.

"First of all, you will need to do something else besides writing poems to generate income," he says. "But more important, the more broadly you are able to learn and think, the better your art will be."

Also speaking at tonight's Faculty Reading are novelist Leslie Epstein, a CAS professor of English, and novelist, essayist, and short story writer Sigrid Nunez, a lecturer in the Creative Writing Program.

The annual Creative Writing Program Faculty Reading is tonight, Tuesday, April 5, at the Florence & Chafetz Hillel House, 213 Bay State Rd., fourth floor, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Boston University Creative Writing Faculty Reading

Source: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2016/michael-brokos-creative-writing-faculty-reading/

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