Athens, Ga. – April is National Poetry Month, and The Georgia Review at the University of Georgia will set the recognition in motion by presenting readings by two veteran poets, Dave Smith and Albert Goldbarth, on April 2 and April 4 respectively. Both readings are set for 7 p.m. and will take place at Ciné Bar/Café/Cinema located at 234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens.
Smith, the author of more than a dozen poetry collections and twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is the final reader on the 2011-12 Georgia Poetry Circuit, the consortium of schools that has brought nationally renowned writers to the state for more than 25 years. The Georgia Review, UGA’s internationally known journal of arts and letters, has been a sponsor of the circuit since its inception.
Smith’s books include Hawks on Wires (2011), The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (2000), and In the House of the Judge (1983). He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and other agencies. Critic Helen Vendler, writing about The Wick of Memory, praises it for “reclaiming the grittiness of ordinary life for lyric.”
A teacher and editor as well as a writer, Smith has taught at many major institutions, including the University of Utah, Louisiana State University and most recently, at, Johns Hopkins University. He has edited the Southern Review, the New Virginia Review, the University of Utah Press Poets Series and the Southern Messenger Signature Poets series of the Louisiana State University Press.
Goldbarth, the only living two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, has published regularly in The Georgia Review for three decades and has read to Athens audiences several times in recent years. His appearance this time is being co-sponsored by UGA’s Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts.
Well known for his high-volume output and his encyclopedic mind, Goldbarth has published more than 30 books of poetry and essays as well as a novel. His latest, Ordinary People (2012), was most immediately preceded by To Be Read in Five Hundred Years (2009) and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (2007). Goldbarth has earned Vendler’s high marks for his “enormous curiosity,” for “the momentum of his zest,” and “his sympathy of souls with the historical personages he resuscitates.”
Goldbarth is the Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University.
For more information on The Georgia Review, see http://garev.uga.edu/.
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