Poet and Princeton professor James Richardson.

Open to the public at no cost, Language Arts Live is sponsored by the Bates English department, Humanities Fund, Learning Associates Program and John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-6256 or 207-784-0416, or rfarnswo@bates.edu.

Richardson was described as “one of America’s most distinctive contemporary poets” by the Boston Review. His most recent book, By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Cooper Canyon Press, 2010) was a National Book Award finalist and Publishers Weekly’s “Book of the Year.”

His Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Ausable Press, 2004), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other works include Second Guesses (Wesleyan University Press, 1984), and the cult favorite Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2001).

Richardson is the fifth winner of the $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, given annually to honor an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition.

His poetry appears frequently in The New Yorker, Slate and Paris Review. He has been a professor of English and creative writing at Princeton University since 1980. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and his doctorate from the University of Virginia.

Vermont's poet laureate, Sydney Lea.

Veteran poet Sydney Lea, whom author Michael Pollan called “as fine a companion on the page as American writing about nature has to offer,” continues Bates College’s Language Arts Live reading series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Open to the public at no cost, Language Arts Live is sponsored by the English department, the Humanities Fund, the Learning Associates Program and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund. For more information, please contact 207-786-6256 or 207-784-0416, or rfarnswo@bates.edu.

Recently named poet laureate of Vermont, Lea has been described as “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” His most recent poetry collection is Young of the Year (Four Way Books, 2011). The collection I Was Thinking of Beauty is scheduled for publication by Four Way in 2013.

Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. Of his previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize.

In 1989, Lea published the novel A Place in Mind (Scribner). His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was reissued by the Lyons Press in 2003.

Lea has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury colleges, as well as institutions in Europe. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as numerous anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vt., where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.

Taking place Oct. 25-29, this year’s Translations international poetry festival celebrates cross-cultural communication with visiting poets from the Americas, Europe and Japan. The festival begins at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25, with a welcome, readings and a reception in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

For more information, please contact 207-786-8293 or gdumais@bates.edu.

Meet the Translations poets of 2011:

Polina Barskova was recognized early on as a prodigy and is considered one of the most gifted Russian poets under age 40. Her work has been translated into four languages, including recent English editions of This Lamentable City (trans. by Ilya Kaminsky, Tupelo Press, 2010) and Zoo in Winter (trans. by David Stromberg and Boris Draliuk; Melville House, 2011). Since releasing her first collection at 15, Barskova has published five additional books. She is an assistant professor of Russian literature and film at Hampshire College.

Born in Waterville, Maine, Rhea Côté’s work contemplates what it means to be Franco-American and female in the United States. Her published work includes Wednesday’s Child (Rheta Press, 1999), winner of the 1997 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Award; and I am Franco-American and Proud of It: Franco-American Women’s Anthology, which she co-edited and designed. Côté teaches courses in Franco-American women’s experiences and creative nonfiction at the University of Maine.

A senior lecturer in English at Bates, Robert Farnsworth began writing poetry in his teens, and makes work that strives to reconcile opposites — distance and detail, the habitual and the exotic. His pieces have appeared in multiple magazines, two poetry collections from Wesleyan University Press, and the 2010 book Rumored Islands (Harbor Mountain Press).

Francisca López, professor of Spanish at Bates, has published numerous scholarly articles and has written or co-edited two books. As a creative writer, she has published poetry in a variety of journals, and she and Aburto Guzmán co-authored a collection of short stories, La séptima mujer (Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2004), and the novel Posdata (same publisher, 2004).

Naomi Otsubo has pursued her passion for language throughout her life as a writer and translator. Born and raised in Tokyo, she will release her first book of Japanese poetry later this year. A Maine resident, Otsubo has quietly rebelled against social constraints by simply living on her own terms.

Danny Plourde comes from Quebec. Since his first book, Vers quelque (Hexagone, 2004), he has published several poetry collections and a novel. The role of the poem in the public square and literary engagement are important issues of his creative approach. Joseph Morneau: La pinte est en spécial (Vlb, 2011), a novel dealing with media bars in Montreal, is his latest book. Plourde has also performed with a garage band called Les Fidel Castrol.

Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu has published several books of short stories and poetry. She researches modern and post-modern German literature, Romanian-German literature and creative writing, and is head of the foreign languages and literatures department at Transylvania University in Brasov. Puchianu is an advocate for the use of role-playing in teaching foreign languages and literatures.

Miguel Angel Zapata is a prolific poet who received the Premio Latino de Literatura (Latino Award for Literature) in 2003. Poet Anthony Seidman states, “He is able to both light up and embrace this world, and that is no small feat. Zapata is without a doubt one of the most innovative poets in Latin America today.” Zapata is a professor of Hispanic literature at Hofstra University, where he also directs the Hofstra Hispanic Review.

The Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates presents poet Aracelis Girmay at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 24, in Chase Hall’s Skelton Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The reading is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6256 or 207-786-6326.

An inheritor of Eritrean, Puerto Rican and African American traditions, Girmay released her debut poetry collection, Teeth, in 2007 (Curbstone Press). Her second, Kingdom Animalia, will be released by BOA Editions this year and has received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, given to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit.

Girmay is assistant professor of poetry at Hampshire College, and is on the faculty of Drew University’s low-residency M.F.A. program in poetry.

Language Arts Live is sponsored by the English department, the programs in African American and American cultural studies, the Office of Intercultural Education, the Learning Associates Program, the Humanities Fund, the Brandow Family Fund for the Arts and the John Tagliabue Fund.

At the reception, Jenny Stasio ’07 will talk about her work with incarcerated women through her position with Family Crisis Services and its Incarcerated Women’s Program.

Recognizing the statistical connection between female incarceration and domestic abuse, the program offers support groups for women at the Cumberland County Jail (Portland) and the Maine Correctional Center (Windham), one of only a handful of such programs offered by U.S. domestic violence agencies.

In 2007, the program added creative writing activities to its educational groups. The women began each creative writing session by reading author Natalie Goldberg’s tips for writers in Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within:

1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
6. Go for the jugular.

The majority of the work in the exhibition was done within 15-minute free-writing sessions.

To create the photographic portraits for More Than a Rap Sheet, Family Crisis Services worked with the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Salt alum Christine Heinz, who photographed the women.

Donations of non-spiral-bound notebooks or composition books are greatly appreciated. They are always needed for the project’s ongoing work.

Author Ander Monson, author of the 2005 poetry collection Vacationland and this year’s nonfiction Vanishing Point, visits Bates College to read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is open to the public at no cost. The Language Arts Live series is sponsored by the English department, the Learning Associates Program, the Humanities Fund, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies and the John Tagliabue fund. For more information contact 207-786-6256 or 207-786-6326.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review described Monson as “a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, designer of both Web and print pages, and compulsive techno-tinkerer, and he’s always got multiple projects brewing.”

His other books include the fiction Other Electricities (Sarabande Books, 2005); the nonfiction Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (Graywolf Press, 2007) and another poetry volume, The Available World (Sarabande, 2010).

In his introduction to Neck Deep, Robert Polito called Monson “so cunning and quick-witted as an essayist that it’s almost easy to miss just how touching, how human, how stubbornly elegiac his writing can be.”

Originating from Michigan, Monson lives in Tucson, Ariz., where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press, and teaches at the University of Arizona.

Essayist and award-winning poet Marianne Boruch continues the Language Arts Live series of literary readings at Bates at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 27, in Skelton Lounge, Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Featuring highly regarded writers reading from and discussing their work, Language Arts Live events are open to the public at no cost. The series is sponsored by the English department, the Learning Associates Program, the Bates Humanities Fund, the programs in African American studies and American cultural studies, and the John Tagliabue Poetry fund.

The series resumes on Oct. 11 with novelist Debra Sparks. For more information, please contact 207-786-6326 or 207-786-6256, or these: rfarnsworth@bates.edu or eosucha@bates.edu.

“Boruch’s superb instinct for the structure of free verse and her fine eye for daily life have won her national respect,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “Few readers will come away unimpressed by the supple care Boruch takes in depicting her everyday scenes.”

Boruch has won awards for her six collections of poetry, of which the most recent is Grace, Fallen From (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). Her poems have been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, The Yale Review and Poetry London.

She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published two books of essays, the most recent being Poetry’s Old Air (University of Michigan Press, 1995). Her poems and prose have appeared in collections such as Poets of the New Century, The Best American Poetry, 2009 and the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry.

Boruch has received numerous awards, including the Strousse Award, two Pushcart Prizes and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has had residencies at the Anderson Center, The American Academy in Rome and The Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy.

She has taught at the University of Maine Farmington and Warren Wilson College. She currently teaches English and directs the M.F.A. writing program at Purdue University. She plans to release a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler, next year.

“Her poems often give fresh examples of how rare and thrilling it can be to notice,” said fellow poet Robert Pinsky.

Jonathan Skinner, assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates, reads from his own poetry and from the poetry journal that he edits, Ecopoetics, at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, in Chase Hall’s Skelton Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

The event is part of the Envirolunch series, a weekly community gathering around environmental topics at Bates, sponsored by the Environmental Studies program. A question-and-answer period follows the reading.

Skinner is a published poet and also writes “ecocriticism” on contemporary poetry and poetics — essays that explore the role of aesthetics in intersections between nature and culture, and the role of language in our perceptions of the natural world. He is interested in soundscape studies, including the art of bird song.

His emphasis on relations between cultural diversity and biodiversity has also led him to work in ethnopoetics, the dialogical engagement with cultures based in non-Western languages.

In addition, he has published poetry translations from Spanish, French and Old Occitan, a distinctive Latin-derived language of southern France.

The journal Ecopoetics focuses on creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Learn more.

It is a coffee-table book you would never put on your coffee table. The title, War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003–2007, is explicit. But nothing can prepare the reader for what is inside: 400 pages of color photos showing exactly what war does to the human body.

A soldier struck by a sniper’s bullet that pierces his helmet, driving fragments of the helmet, bullet, and bone into his brain. Another soldier burned over 80 percent of his body during “munitions disposal.” A very pregnant woman shot in the stomach by an AK-47.

On its face, War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq is simply a how-to guide for surgeons preparing for the battlefield, told in matter-of-fact medical language by 53 doctors who contributed cases. The book documents innovative techniques involving massive transfusions, prophylactic treatment of tissue to minimize amputations, and treatment of head injuries, such as the one suffered by Bob Woodruff of ABC News, who wrote the book’s foreword.

The book was published in 2008 by the Army Medical Department’s Borden Institute, but, as Lounsbury says, “it almost wasn’t.”

But its explicit photos (the kind few Americans have ever seen, from any war), combined with pre-publication buzz about the Army’s censorship attempts, made the book the first of its kind to attract attention outside medical journals.

The book was the consuming passion of retired U.S. Army Col. Dave Lounsbury ’72, a physician who took part in both the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars. Although he retired in 2005 after 26 years in the Army Medical Department, he and two co-editors worked on the book for the next two years.

It was published in 2008 by the Army Medical Department’s Borden Institute, but, as Lounsbury says, “it almost wasn’t.”

Early in the year, Lounsbury began to detect efforts to suppress the book or at least restrict its circulation. The press run was sharply reduced; a non-military publisher was rejected; and an Army censor came up with a four-page list of required changes, including the removal of words like “soldier” and “Marine,” or any reference to an enemy weapon, such as an IED.

Lounsbury pushed back, appealing to the Army surgeon general with a simple strategy that he credits to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “We restated the obvious,” Lounsbury says. In a meeting with the surgeon general on June 16, Lounsbury mentioned that The New York Times had a set of galley proofs and that ABC News was aware of the book. The latter was a veiled reference to Bob Woodruff’s involvement. “His name was not used,” Lounsbury says. “Implied? Yes.”

The Army soon published the book, restoring most of the censored content — including the words mentioned above — after Lounsbury and his co-editors made a line-by-line appeal. “It doesn’t take much to appreciate that if the government doesn’t want you to see flag-draped coffins, it wouldn’t want you to see the graphic images in this book,” Lounsbury says.

In August, The New York Times was the first to report on the Army’s “strenuous efforts…to keep it out of civilian hands.” Within months, the book was reviewed in such disparate publications as The Economist (“The book is dense — about the size and mass of the chest-plate in a set of body armor — and will save many lives”) and The New York Review of Books (“What you get is the war without the war story.… [T]here is only one thing in sight, and that is consequence”).

Forty-one years ago, Lounsbury came to Bates from Stoneham, Mass., and he often describes his first two years as “the worst of my life,” calling himself a poor and immature student. He was a freshman when his older brother, Guy, lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam. Over the next two years, Lounsbury’s father insisted that Dave make weekly visits to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where his brother was recovering from his wounds. Every Friday after classes Dave would take the bus out of town, which meant missing Saturday classes (Bates was on a six-day class schedule back then) when Dave was struggling with his science-heavy coursework.

“Up at Bates, I was against the war,” he recalls. “And down in Philly, in these long, Florence Nightingale wards with 50 Marines on one side and 50 Marines on the other side, you couldn’t help yourself. I mean, you loved these guys — you’d do anything for them.”

A biology major, Lounsbury doesn’t know what effect, if any, his brother’s injuries had on his eventual decision to enroll at the University of Vermont College of Medicine with the help of a military scholarship. He rejects the pat answer. “I didn’t choose this career in medicine,” he says. “It was a pragmatic decision to pay for my medical education.”

Lounsbury’s Army medical career included service with field units in both Gulf wars, the Balkans, and Turkey, as well as teaching stints at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. There, he served as director of the Borden Institute and edited various textbooks on military medicine. “I enjoyed my service and would do it all over again in a heartbeat,” says Lounsbury, who now lives in Columbia, S.C.

When deployed to the Gulf in 2003 with the 10th Combat Support Hospital, Lounsbury firmly supported the war in Iraq. “I believed,” he says, accepting as truth the idea that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Trained in internal medicine and neurology, he cared for Iraqi prisoners, an experience that became the focus of a Nova segment, “Life and Death in the War Zone.” “No medical person would hope for war,” he says. “But if there is going to be a war, I wanted to be there. I wanted to see if I could do it.”

“Most people would be repelled by it, but a surgeon will reach into his pocket and take a picture.”

Now, Lounsbury does not hide his opposition to a war that “we never had to fight” and is uncomfortable accepting praise for the book. “I’m receiving credit for other people’s work,” he says. “We have created a little bit of good from a war that should never have happened.”

War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq draws heavily upon the contributions of doctors in the war zones. Back in 2004, Lounsbury had the foresight to include a reply card in each copy of another standard-issue military textbook, Emergency War Surgery. The card asked doctors to communicate their frontline findings, and they responded with photos and comments from the field, even phoning in on secure lines. “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry surgeon has a digital camera in his pocket,” says Lounsbury. “They walk into [a combat support hospital] and see Corporal Snuffy lying naked on a table with some part of his anatomy blown away. Most people would be repelled by it, but a surgeon will reach into his pocket and take a picture.”

The book seeks to shorten the learning curve of combat medicine, “to help in the first few minutes of chaos because no one just walks in, ready for the kind of polytrauma seen in warfare.”

It especially teaches battlefield doctors to expect “ferocious” wounds caused by the obscene trifecta of blast trauma, penetrating trauma, and burns. “Civilian doctors don’t often see all three at once in the same body,” Lounsbury says.

Returning to Bates in March as the College Key Distinguished Alumnus in Residence, Lounsbury gave an informal lecture that held the rapt attention of his listeners in Chase Hall. He told the story of three young soldiers in Iraq who each lost a leg, or more, from a single missile that penetrated their armored personnel carrier. Operated on simultaneously, all three survived. He noted that just as military technology has improved, military medicine has strived to keep pace.

“The wounds are often lifelong. Recovery is incomplete. Life is interrupted — creating a before and an after.”

“We are saving people who would’ve died in prior wars.” Body armor is one reason, he says. “We’re saving lives but not limbs.” Another reason is the talent of battlefield medics who “are doing a noble job,” saving the lives of soldiers who otherwise would bleed to death or die from a sucking chest wound.

Emotion crept into his voice near the end of his talk. “The wounds are often lifelong. Recovery is incomplete. Life is interrupted — creating a before and an after.”

Years ago, during one of those difficult weekend visits to see his brother Guy in Philadelphia, Lounsbury was on an elevator with his brother. It stopped, the door opened, and three Navy doctors wearing long white coats walked in. “I was behind Guy, holding the wheelchair,” Dave recalls. “They were looking at him. They were building a new right arm for him — you could see it. They wished him well.”

One day 35 years later, Lounsbury got on the elevator at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. “The door opened, and it was full of these guys — they all looked like teenagers — in wheelchairs, with various limbs missing. For a minute, I had to concentrate. I wasn’t sure who was on the elevator. Was it the teenager from Bates 35 years ago looking at these doctors in the white coats? Or was it me who was in the white coat? The moment was like a strobe light.”

Lounsbury got off the elevator on the next floor. “I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear it.”

For the book’s afterword, Lounsbury selected lines of poetry, as if invoking great poets might help lay readers make sense of the book’s horrific content. From Virgil’s Aeneid, he chose “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt” (There are tears for the events of the world and our human mortality touches the heart).

From Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” he offered 14 lines, including the final four:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Fiercely honest and self-critical, Lounsbury wrestles endlessly with his role in bringing the book into the public sphere. Mostly, he comes back to the view he held when he began working on it: “If Americans are paying for the war, they need to see what the war is all about.”

But then he goes on wrestling: “The censors say it has no role for the lay public, for the civilian, and that’s why they wanted to restrict it. The gentler way [of saying that] is, ‘If you open the book, you’re not going to appreciate what you’re looking at. You’re not going to understand it, you don’t know the wounding ballistics, you’re not educated enough to appreciate what you’re looking at.’

“I’ve changed my mind about that three or four times.”

One evening, over wine and hors d’oeuvres in the Bobcat Den, two themes prominent on campus enjoyed an intimate encounter.

With the Bates Contemplates Food initiative spotlighting what we eat, and the renewed curricular emphasis on the practice of writing, the time was right for a “Literary Café.” The Writing Workshop event in December gathered faculty and staff for food-related readings and chat, seasoned with jazz from physics professor-guitarist John Smedley and bassist Tim Clough.

Readings were personal or historical, humorous or solemn. Poems by Rob Farnsworth, visiting professor of English, pinpointed inner junctions between food and words. His “After Dinner” explored the stimulations of postprandial conversation, while “Douce Ame” resorted to food aromas as a palliative for writer’s block:

“…I take spice bottles down from the cabinet one at a time… / and fill my head with their fragrances, as I would with sad airs / for strings.…”

A splendid Dining Services buffet — featuring Swedish meatballs, phyllo filled with cheese and vegetables, pesto and sundried tomato pizza, and mini-whoopie pies — set a fitting context for poems read by Jane Costlow, professor of Russian.

She focused on other essential questions about food: What to do when there isn’t enough? And what, when there is enough?

First she read from “Hunger,” Velimir Khlebnikov’s long lament about a Russian famine in 1920–21: “‘The acorns are gone! The people have eaten my acorns!’ / The scampering squirrel chatters angrily.”

Next came Nikolay Zabolotsky’s “Dinner,” whose conclusion, as we sat there feeling satisfied with life, was worth remembering:

“[I]f only we could see in shining rays / the blissful childhood of the plants / surely we should descend upon our knees / before the bubbling pan of vegetables.”