February 16, 1996
Contact: Brenda Ellis, (615) 322-2706
Vanderbilt University hosts poet Robert McDowell
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Robert McDowell will read from his poetry at
Vanderbilt University Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 7:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall, room
126. McDowell is the author of a collection of poems, "Quiet Money,"
and a book-length poem, "The Diviners."
The event, sponsored by the Department of English, is free and open to the
public.
His most recent work, "The Diviners," is a narrative poem that
traces 50 years in the life of one American family. Divided into five decades,
the poem chronicles the family's betrayals, losses and repairs, while history
and circumstances change the characters.
His poems, essays and fiction have been published widely in the United States
and abroad, and his revised edition of the classic text "Sound and
Form in Modern Poetry" is forthcoming from The University of Michigan
Press.
He is the editor of "Poetry After Modernism" and co-translator
of the Czech writer Ota Pavel's short stories, "How I Came to Know
Fish."
Frederick Morgan, editor of The Hudson Review, said of McDowell's first
book, "Quiet Money," "This fresh, uncompromising voice will
be greeted with cheers by readers who have been turned off by the ornate
pretentiousness of so much contemporary poetry. Gifted with a novelistic
grasp of exactly what it is like to be a 20th century American, Robert McDowell
is interested in other people, not just himself."
And Louis Simpson, reviewing "Quiet Money" in The Washington Post,
observed that McDowell's work signals that poetry is leaving the academy.
McDowell makes his home in Brownsville, Ore., where he is executive director
of Story Line Press.
-VU-
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