Issue date: 10/16/05 Section: Arts & Entertainment

David Wojahn [Click to enlarge]

David Wojahn, a nationally-renowned poet, will be reading a collection of his work today at7 p.m. in the Fine Arts Gallery in the Center for Fine and PerformingArts.

 

The event is a part of the Writers in the Gallery series, which is put on by the department of English and foreign languages, in cooperation with the art department, said Reginald Shepherd, interim director of creative writing.

 

The Writers in the Gallery series is a collection of readings from notable poets and fiction writers, said Shepherd, head of this year's Writers in the Gallery series.

"Four readings are held in the series each academic year; the last reading is usually a group reading by UWF student writers," he said.

 

Wojahn does a few readings at universities every semester, and enjoys reading his poems for an audience, he said. He is the guest of honor at the gallery tonight.

 

Wojahn plans on reading poems from a new volume he's publishing this winter, which gathers poems from his previous six books, along with a group of poems that haven't appeared in book form before, he said.

 

"Wojahn's widely published poetry has wongreat praise and acclaim," Shepherd said. "Critics have called his work formally inventive, elegiac and redemptive, aesthetically and emotionally risky, as well as ingenious and compelling."

 

Currently, he is a professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Shepherd said.

 

He had his first collection of poems, "Icehouse Lights" published in 1982, for which he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Book Award, Shepherd said.

 

"His second collection, 'Glassworks,' was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and won the Society of Midland Authors' Award for the year's best volume of poetry," Shepherd said.

 

Pittsburgh Press also published four of his subsequent books-"Mystery Train" (1990), "Late Empire" (1994), "The Falling Hour" (1997) and "Spirit Cabinet" (2002)-- and his most recent collection, "Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems" 1982-2004, will be published by Pittsburgh Press in 2006, Shepherd said.

 

Wojahn said he was thrilled when he won his first award.

 

"It meant that my work would now be read by a few people," Wojahn said, "And I mean a few, since the readership for poetry books is pretty small."

 

"My first book won a prize from Yale University Press, the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to be exact," he said. "I was overjoyed to have the book appear from Yale, since a great many of the poets I was reading and admired had published their first books in that series."

 

He started seriously writing poems in the mid- 1970s.

 

"A lot of the poets who I was reading in those days and cared passionately about still mean a great deal to me-James Wright, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, John Berryman, Robert Lowell," Wojahn said.

 

"I didn't always understand their poems when I first started reading them, but they haunted and provoked me in a way that made me read them over and over again," he added.

 

Wojahn said he gets his ideas from everywhere.

 

 "It's always a mixture of things that really happened and things that are fictive," he said. "Ideas from a poem can come from anywhere, but I think poets for the most part have a small number of obsessive subjects, wounds or holes in their lives that they want to be filled, and they keep coming back to them."

 

"It's not about getting ideas for poems, as much as it's about trusting serendipity," he added.

 

Tonight's Writers in the Gallery will feature readings from Wojahn, as well as

a question and answer period regarding his work, Shepherd said. For more information on the Writers in the Gallery series, contact the department of English and foreign languages.

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