Lamont Poet to Speak Wednesday

Michael Collier, former Poet Laureate of Maryland and highly respected poet, will begin this year’s Class of 1945 Library Lamont Poetry Series with a reading of his works. The series is financed by The Lamont Fund, which was established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont ’20 and former Academy Librarian Jacquelyn Thomas.  The reading will be held in the Assembly Hall on Wednesday night at 7:30 PM and will be followed by a book signing event.Most members of the Lamont Poet Committee agreed on inviting Collier to the Academy.“We thought if it is our job to bring important poets to town, then Collier is somebody we’ve got to have,” English instructor Ellen Wolff, who is a member of the Lamont Poet Committee, said.Collier is an esteemed writer among literary circles; he is the author of six books of poetry, of which “The Ledge” was named as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  He is professor in the Creative Writing Program at University of Maryland, poetry editor of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, recipient of the 2009 American Academy of Arts and Letters' Arts and Letters Award for Literature, recipient of the Thomas J. Watson, National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships and Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.After the reading on Wednesday night, Collier will be delivering a talk to all preps about narrative writing and writing from personal experience.English instructor Ralph Sneeden said that Collier’s visit will greatly benefit preps.  “Michael Collier’s works, along with those of Seamus Heaney, who is a big part of our prep curriculum and a Nobel laureate who passed away recently, can be very narrative; that’s why it works so well in our writing curriculum,” Sneeden said. “I believe Collier provides excellent models for younger students who are wrestling with how to describe settings, objects, people, and actions in a really compressed space.”Some English classes have been reading Collier’s poetry this past term, and though his works can be difficult to interpret, students have handled discussions well.  “Although as a class, we had to read the poems through a couple times, we handled it well,” upper Zoe Sudduth said. “We definitely had in-depth discussions about Collier’s poems such as structural patterns.”Sneeden said that class discussions about Collier’s works could be difficult for students, partly because Collier’s style of writing is hard to find these days.“Discussion can be challenging when you talk about writing… not just the meaning of the poetry but the way it is written, and how narratives are realized in poems, instead of in prose and short stories,” Sneeden said. “Also Collier uses narrative poetry, using the personal narrative in poetry, and it’s hard to find writers who model this style, this approach to poetry.”Wolff said that the beauty of the Lamont poetry series is that it enables the Academy to host major league poets on campus twice a year and to have these poets interact in a substantial way with the students. “Most colleges and universities are not so lucky. It’s an embarrassment of riches,” she said.Faculty hoped that students would learn much from Collier’s visit, and that it would be a valuable experience.  “As we say to our students, poetry is not only a written thing, it’s an oral thing,” Wolff said. “So for students to have a chance to hear the language read by someone who is intimately familiar with that language is great. We hope this will deepen the students’ understanding of what poetry is, what it can do, why it matters.”Sneeden agreed. “I hope that students will get a better understanding of narrative poetry for sure, a better appreciation for narrative poetry and its place in contemporary poetry,” he said. “I also hope that they gain some confidence and maybe even some inspiration in how to approach their narrative whether it is a prose [piece] or a poem.”