Keith Waldrop, winner of the 2009 National Book Award for poetry, will read from his work on Friday, February 19 at 5:30 p.m. at AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence. The reading coincides with a show of Waldrop's artwork in the AS220 Project Space gallery.
Waldrop, who is Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities at Brown University, has for nearly four decades been creating a lyrical body of visual art that mirrors his extraordinary oeuvre of poetry, fiction, and translation.
He received the National Book Award for "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy", which presents three related poem sequences - "Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruvius," described by the National Book Award committee as "a virtuosic poetic triptych." The committee goes on to say that "these powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop's romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendental author for the new millennium."
Keith Waldrop, with his wife, noted poet and translator Rosemarie Waldrop have been active in the the avant-garde and experimental literary art scene for over forty years, publishing noteworthy authors on their small independent press, Burning Deck.
Some of Waldrop's other recent books are The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon, with Sample Poems, The House Seen from Nowhere, and a translation of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire.
His reading, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by AS220 and by the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown.
Reception to follow at the AS220 Project Space at 93 Mathewson St.
