Frank Bidart and Garth Greenwell will give an online reading at Monday's NYS Summer Writers Institute
“Once I finally get the typed page to the point where it does seem ‘right’—where it does seem to reproduce the voice I hear—something very odd happens: the ‘being’ of the poem suddenly becomes the poem on paper, and no longer the ‘voice’ in my head. The poem on paper suddenly seems a truer embodiment of the poem’s voice than what I still hear in my head. I’ve learned to trust this when it happens—at that point, the entire process is finished.”
-- Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990
Frank Bidart, will be joined by novelist Garth Greenwell for a NYS Summer Writers Institute online reading at 7 p.m. Monday, July 18.
The reading is free and online via Zoom. Reservations are not required.
In "The Frank Bidart Poem That Sums Up How Artists Innovate," (The Atlantic, Jan. 16, 2020) Garth Greenwell discusses how Bidart has influenced his writing:
"To read him is to experience someone writing utterly without defense, with a kind of lacerating honesty. There is one line in particular, from Bidart’s prose poem “Borges and I,” that for years has been a kind of motto for me: 'We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them, we change them and are changed.' It’s a refrain that’s helped me develop my sense of what artistic innovation is, and what it means to innovate in a meaningful and exciting way."
Greenwell interviewed Bidart for a story published in the Summer 2019 edition of The Paris Review
The poem below is taken from “Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2017,” which was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. In its review, Publishers Weekly wrote:
"Relentless and ever willing to face his demons, no matter how terrifying, in the interest of making great art, Bidart is, to my ear, one of the very few major living poets who never wavers, never repeats himself (though he has always orbited the same concerns), and extends his questing and questioning through each new work. This collected poems is an almost overwhelming bounty, a permanent book."
Half-Light
By Frank Bidart
November 3, 2014
That crazy drunken night I maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago. Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy exists only on this page.
First published Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2017
About Frank Bidart
Frank Bidart won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His other collections include Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990).
He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Also next week
July 19: Joyce Carol Oates (Fiction) & Adam Braver (Fiction)
July 20: Student Reading (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction)
July 21: Jamaica Kincaid (Fiction) & Henri Cole (Poetry)