Washington College Celebrates National Poetry Month

Leading Poet Dick Allen to Read and Lecture April 11 and 12

Chestertown, MD — Dick Allen, regarded as one of America's leading contemporary poets and writers, will read from his work and lecture on contemporary poetry at Washington College. The reading takes place at 4 p.m., Tuesday April 11, in the Casey Academic Center Forum. His lecture, "Contemporary Poetry: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Weird," will be held at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday April 12, in the Sophie Kerr Room in the College's Miller Library.

A widely published and anthologized poet, Allen will read from Ode to the Cold War and poems written and published after that 1997 book. Allen's other books of poetry include Flight and Pursuit; Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for the year's best poetry collection; Regions With No Proper Names; and Anon and Various Time Machine Poems.

In his lecture, Allen says he will examine "what's really right and what's really wrong about contemporary poetry, especially American poetry." He'll discuss such movements as New Formalism, Expansive Poetry, the New Narrative, and Language Poetry and talk about why poetry is both greatly popular and not popular at all in America today. Allen also will discuss little-known aspects of what the current state of poetry reveals about contemporary society and contemporary individuals.

Allen has received many awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry Writing, the Hart Crane Poetry Fellowship, the Robert Frost Poetry Fellowship (Bread Loaf), and an Academy of American Poets prize. A noted speaker, he has presented more than 150 lectures, panel talks, and poetry readings at colleges and universities throughout the United States. He also reviews poetry, and is the director of creative writing and Charles A. Dana professor of English at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.

Allen's appearances are sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee and are free and open to the public.