May 19, 2016
Poet Alice Fulton to give 53rd annual Roethke Reading May 27
Alice Fulton
Poet and author Alice Fulton will give the 53rd annual Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Reading at 8 p.m. Friday, May 27, in Room 130 of Kane Hall, also known as the Roethke Auditorium. The event is free and the public is invited.
Fulton is the author of nine books, including “Barely Composed” (2015), her most recent poetry collection; as well as the work of connected stories “The Nightingales of Troy” (2009); “Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems” (2005) and “Felt” (2002), which received the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.
Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Short Stories and The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. She is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.
Fulton is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among many other awards and honors.
Of “Barely Composed,” a reviewer for The Boston Globe wrote, “Alice Fulton … can make you see the space between the stars … (her) poems give us access to those spaces between and beyond words, a wilderness where meaning awaits capture.”
Asked by New Yorker writer Alice Baumgartner in 2010 how she defines poetry and what distinguishes it from prose, Fulton said, “Poetry emphasizes music, rhythm, reticence, multiplicity. These qualities, present in prose to varying degrees, are intensified in poetry, framed and underscored by the poetic line.”
She added later, “Maybe prose is like walking while poetry is like dancing. We walk to get somewhere, always moving forward. But we dance just to dance, and the movement sometimes goes backwards or downwards.”
The series is presented by the University of Washington Department of English. Theodore H. Roethke, for whom the lecture series is named, taught at the UW from 1947 until his death in 1963, and was recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award.
Learn more about the reading and read lists of past presenters at its website.
Tag(s): College of Arts & Sciences • Department of English • Roethke Reading • Theodore Roethke
