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Getty Commissioned Poems


Engraving from <i>Perspective Pratique</i> / Dubreuil
 
Visions and Bound-ries
An Evening with Three American Poets

Friday, April 26, 2002
7:30 p.m
Harold M. Williams Auditorium


The Getty Research Institute is pleased to present an evening of poetry with acclaimed writers David Antin, Marvin Bell, and Jorie Graham. Each has been commissioned to write a poem bearing on the Research Institute's 2001–2002 theme "Frames of Viewing: Perception, Experience, Judgment." At Visions and Bound-ries, these poets, all of whom have examined the dilemmas of how body, mind, and one's culture combine to produce perception and experience, will read their new poems as well as some of the earlier work that has secured their place among the most noted figures of contemporary American poetry.

Marvin Bell / Photo: Jason Bell
 
Marvin Bell
Title: The Journal of the Posthumous Present

Marvin Bell is the author of seventeen books of poetry and essays, and the recipient of many awards, including the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. Bell's lates book, Nightworks: Poems 1962–2000, employs the groundbreaking poetic form first featured in The Book of the Dead Man and Ardor. Widely anthologized, He has been called a "maverick" and "an insider who thinks like an outsider." Bell is Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, and in 2000 was named the State of Iowa's first Poet Laureate.

Jorie Graham / Photo: Jim Harris
 
Jorie Graham
Title: Little History of Poverty

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has taught at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and was recenently the first woman appointed Boylston Professor in the Department of English and American Literature at Harvard University. Graham was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1997.

David Antin / Photo: Marion Ettlinger
 
David Antin
Title: How Wide Is the Frame?

David Antin is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, as well as a poet, a critic, and a performer. He has published nine volumes of poetry and numerous essays in art and literary journals. Since 1972 he has been working at "talk poems"— improvised, speculative meditations that are described by some critics as a combination of Wittgenstein and Lenny Bruce, or alternately Mark Twain and Gertrude Stein. Antin is currently a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, where he is working on a project that concerns changing the frame of reference for a theory of modernism.