Donning a turtleneck and snow boots, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, along with author Leslie Epstein and other faculty members, read excerpts of their works at the Creative Writing Program’s annual Faculty Reading Monday night in the School of Management auditorium.
‘We’re very happy to be able to show the richness of our faculty to Boston,’ said Epstein, director of the Creative Writing Program, host of the event and the father of Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein.
Pinsky, introduced by Epstein as a man who ‘has done more for poets than anyone since Ezra Pound,’ read four poems, including one about why he decided to return to the East Coast.
‘Every year, this event makes me so glad to have come back here after teaching for 10 years at [the University of California at] Berkeley,’ he said.
Epstein, a Rhodes Scholar and recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, read an anecdote from his newest novel San Remo Drive, a work about his experience growing up in Hollywood.
Readers had 10 minutes to present their work, which included poetry or fiction. Geoffrey Hill, a university professor of literature and religion, read a number of his poems, including one composed after watching a Jimi Hendrix concert on tape. Dressed in a brown tweed jacket and speaking with a scholarly British accent, Hill said he wrote the poem after a reviewer of one of his books wrote, ‘this old fart’s book makes me think of the way Jimi Hendrix plays.’
University Professor Rosanna Warren read a poem from her new book Departures and two poems she said were inspired by her alter ego, Anne Verveine, a 30-something woman born in southern France in 1965.
‘I was also born there … She was born inside me then,’ Warren said.
The other readers included professor and fiction writer Martha Cooley, Wellesley College professor and visiting poetry lecturer David Ferry and guest reader Dillon Tracy, a Graduate School of Arts and Science alumnus who completed the Creative Writing Program.
‘We’re as proud of our students as we are of our faculty,’ Epstein said.
Tracy called reading with his teachers and mentors ‘a great honor.’
‘It’s absolutely splendid, but also very intimidating,’ he said.
Creative writing professor Ha Jin, a fiction writer and 1994 GRS graduate, was unable to attend because of the weekend weather.
Despite the snow, the audience filed into the auditorium before the 7:30 p.m. starting time.
CAS junior Emma Hawes said she enjoyed the event.
‘I was surprised to hear audibly the poets I’ve read,’ she said, noting that Pinsky still speaks with a Jersey accent.
CAS senior Robert Friedman said he came to the reading to hear some leading poets read their works and particularly enjoyed Ferry and Tracy, with Hill being his favorite.
‘They sounded exactly like they would have if we had been spying on them in their rooms,’ he said. ‘They had so much character.’
Danielle Bauman, a College of Fine Arts sophomore, echoed Friedman’s sentiments about the event.
‘They lived every poem for me,’ she said, adding that she wants ‘to go home and read them myself.’
The annual Faculty Reading started more than a decade ago and has served as way for faculty members to present their works and translations, according to event organizers.
‘I think we started doing it to bring the program together,’ Pinsky said. ‘There are so many writers who teach here, it just seems like, why waste it?’