e73f64d63c89da3e9311e4a13c808ccd.jpg

Award-winning poets to read their works

By Hank Kalet, Special Writer
   The Princeton University Creative Writing faculty wants to give the winners of its high school poetry prize a chance to meet the public.
   It is hosting a poetry reading Sept. 27 at Labyrinth Books featuring three award-winning poets, including 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith, and the four winners of the 2012 Leonard Milberg ‘53 Secondary School Poetry Prize.
   Susan Wheeler, one of the three faculty members who will read, said the program has been in place for more than a decade and attracts submissions from around the globe. The winners are brought to Princeton to have lunch with the creative writing faculty and spend time on the Princeton campus.
   This year, the faculty decided to add a new twist — a public reading.
   ”We thought it would be lovely to give the students an opportunity to give a reading while they are in town,” she said. “For some, it will be their first opportunity to read in public.”
   Ms. Wheeler has been teaching with the poetry faculty since 1999 and is the author of five books of poems, “Bag ‘o’ Diamonds,” “Smokes,” “Source Codes,” “Ledger” and “Assorted Poems,” and a novel, “Record Palace.”
   She has won the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her sixth book, “Meme,” will be published in October.
   Also reading will be Ms. Smith and James Richardson and student winners Hannah Srajer, Kat Kulke, Kathleen Cole, and Anthony De Santis.
   Ms. Smith is the author of three books of poetry: “Life on Mars,” which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; “Duende” and “The Body’s Question.” Ms. Smith is also the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Award and a 2005 Whiting Award.
   Mr. Richardson’s many books of poems, aphorism, and essays include “By the Numbers,” “Interglacial,” “Vectors,” “Second Guesses,” “Reservations” and two critical studies. He is the recipient, among other honors, of the 2011Jackson Poetry Prize.
   Ms. Wheeler said that the poetry faculty is incredibly generous, and just as interested in meeting the students as the students will be in meeting published poets.
   This is why, she added, they should not feel intimidated.
   ”For them to read with a Pulitzer Prize winner this year is extraordinary,” she said. “They will probably be nervous, but they shouldn’t be.”
   Ms. Wheeler, for her part, says she is looking forward to the reading and to the publication of “Meme.” The book is composed of three long poems that “look at very personal subjects in terms of loss,” she said.
   ”One is in a kind of Midwest vernacular of the mid-20th century, through a mother’s voice,” she said. “The second is a distortion of that voice and the third explores that through breakups.”
   The work is “less quotidian and more just really, really nasty,” she said with a laugh. “It’s clearly all invented voice. There is a section called ‘The Devil’ that is casting the vernacular in the worst possible voice.”
   In some ways, she said, the new book is more personal than her earlier work. Those books are “not particularly personal.”
   ”I try to find other ways of approaching things that matter to me,” she said. “It is involved in the vernacular and love of American English and the vernaculars. That’s very important to me.”
   She characterizes her work as an effort to “maintain the illusion to myself as much as I can that I can do anything, that I can write in any way I want.”
   ”I know I am better at some things than others, but I like to feel that I don’t have a particular style,” she said. “I know that a lot of my work uses jumps without a lot of filling in, not that it is non-narrative, but I won’t walk a person through a story in the way that some poems do.”
   The poet John Ashberry picks up on this when describing the “narrative Glamour” of Ms. Wheeler’s work as finding “occasions in unlikely places: hardware stores, Herodotus, “Hollywood Squares,” Flemish paintings, Green Stamps, and echoes of archaic and cyber speech. What at first seems cacophonous comes in the end to seem invested with a mournful dignity.”
   Her influences range from Dr. Seuss and the Catholic prayers and hymns of her childhood friends, to W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound and John Berryman. More recently, she has been engaging with the works of C.D. Wright, Muriel Rukeyser and Peter Reading.
   She does not have any specific plans for her next book, preferring to just follow the muse and to see where it leads her.
   ”That’s the exciting part of it for me,” she said. “My past couple of individual collections have been thematic. I am really excited about just writing anything and not worrying about a framework until I have just written.”
The Leonard Milberg ‘53 Secondary School Poetry Prize reading will takeplace Thursday, Sept. 27, at 5:30 p.m. at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton. Admission is free and a reception will follow the reading. For more: 609-497-1600 or www.labyrinthbooks.com