A Reading with Brenda Hillman as the 12th Florie Gale Arons Poet

7:30pm, Monday 8 November 2010
Freeman Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982); Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995); and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003).

Included in their list of 50 of the Most Inspiring Authors in the World, Poets & Writers states "[Hillman] reminds us that the language we use when ordering a sandwich is also the language we use to make art. Her environmental concerns prove writers can offer more than just aesthetic pleasure." Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers' Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is married to poet Robert Hass.

Hillman has been increasingly interested in the innovative and experimental lyric traditions, particularly in how the Romantic concepts of nature and spirit have manifested in contemporary poetry. In her essay entitled "Split, Spark, and Space," Hillman writes about the emergence of different kinds of lyric impulses in her writing: "The sense of a single 'voice' in poetry grew to include polyphonies, oddly collective dictations, and the process of writing itself. This happened in part because of a rediscovered interest in esoteric western tradition and in part because I came to a community of women who were writing in exploratory forms...A poetic method which had heretofore been based on waiting for insight suddenly had to accommodate process, and indeterminate physics, a philosophy of detached looking."

About PRACTICAL WATER (2009)

The latest volume in Hillman's acclaimed meditations on the elements. Not since Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1970 has American poetry seen the likes of the hallucinatory wit and moral clarity that Brenda Hillman brings to Washington in her poems about Congressional Hearings on the Iraq War. Practical Water is, like Hillman's previous two books, Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, both an elemental meditation and an ecopoetics; this time her subject is water: Taoist water, baptismal water, water from the muses' fountains, the practical waters of hydrology from which we draw our being. Here also is a sequence of twinned lyrics for the moon, governess of tides and night vision, for her visible and invisible faces. Violence and the common world, fact and dream, science and magic, intuition and perception are reconfigured in these poems about our political life and earthly fate. If it is time to weep by the waters of Babylon, it is also time to touch water's living currents. No one is reimaging the possibilities of lyric poetry with more intelligence and invention. This is masterful work by one of our finest poets.

Florie Gale Arons graduated from Newcomb College in 1950. Her daughters established the poetry program in 1999 in honor of her 70th birthday. It continues today in her memory. Mrs. Arons' posthumously published collection, Unspoken Words, is available at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, the Tulane Bookstore, and independent bookstores.

For more information please contact Laura Wolford at lwolford@tulane.edu or at (504) 865-5238.