U.S. Poet Laureate to read from his work

U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky reads from his poetry collections, including The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, at March 15 at 7:30 p.m. in the Olin Arts Center. The public is invited to attend free of charge.

Pinsky, currently a professor of graduate writing at Boston University, recently propelled Dante onto the bestseller lists with his 1994 verse translation of the Inferno, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. He is the author of three prose books, Landor’s Poetry, The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World, and his book History of My Heart won the William Carlos Williams Prize. In 1997 he was awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize by the Academy of American Poets. In the fall of 1998, he will publish two new books: A Brief Guide to Sounds of Poetry in English and Handbook of Heartbreak.

The author of an interactive computer “text adventure” loosely modeled on Dante’s Inferno, Pinsky believes poetry and computers share two key attributes — speed and memory.

“They share the great human myth of trope, an image that could be called the secret passage: the discovery of large, manifold channels through a small ordinary looking or all but invisible aperture,” wrote Pinsky, who is poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.