Showing posts with label Jay Parini. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jay Parini. Show all posts

Saturday, August 23, 2008

"Sometimes It Seems As If," a recovered Frost lecture

Literary Imagination has published a talk that Robert Frost delivered October 23, 1947 at Dartmouth College, thanks to the work of James Sitar who plans to edit other little known Frost lectures as a book.  "Sometimes It Seems As If" appeared in Literary Imagination 10.1 (Winter 2008) p.1-14.  The talk engages with the issue of poetry and belief, and Peter Campion, editor of LI quipped, "It's like Frost unplugged."

Portions of the lecture were broadcast on WBUR, with reactions from Andrea Shea, James Sitar, James Campion and Jay Parini.  The Boston Globe also ran an article (February 25, 2008).

Monday, June 9, 2008

Jay Parini, Robert Frost, and 25 teenagers...

Jay Parini, biographer of Robert Frost and author of Why Poetry Matters (2008) was asked to administer the sentence of poetry as punishment to 25 teenagers who vandalized Robert Frost's property in December 2007. He said he used Frost's essay "Education by Poetry."

See: "The Best Way Out Is Through," editorial published in The New York Times, June 8, 2008.

p.s. (June 29, 2008):  Based on the above, I ordered the book, and after a quick skim of Why Poetry Matters, I find no mention of Geoffrey Hill.  Does this mean that Hill does not matter to Parini? Probably not, since he's been tagged in his "Poetry Hut Blog" (latest entry tagged, a link to William Logan's Review of A Treatise of Civil Power, blog entry from January 20, 2008), though my guess is that in this book which boasts it uses no jargon, Heaney seems more user-friendly. Why is it that Hill's closeness to the people and to popular culture always seems to be ignored?

Parini reviewed Robert Lowell: Collected Poems for the Guardian (August 9, 2003).
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/poetry/0,6121,1014876,00.html