Poet laureates speak on campus

Charles Simic, 15th United States poet laureate, read his poetry to more than 100 Boston University students, faculty and local residents Thursday as part of the Robert Lowell Memorial Lectures series.

Three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky, who is also a BU creative writing professor, and Rachel Dewoskin, BU alumna and creative writing professor at New York University, also read excerpts from their own poetic works along with Simic in the BU Photonics Center. The Robert Lowell Memorial Lectures bring distinguished writers to read alongside a member of the Creative Writing program and a recent graduate of the program.

The pieces each of the poets read were dark and brief, concerning themes about time and becoming obsolete.

‘Hardly anybody can name all their great-grandparents, can you?’ Pinsky read from his poem, ‘The Forgetting.’ ‘Will your children’s grandchildren remember your name?’

The motif of forgetting and forgetfulness persisted through the night. In Simic’s case, life imitated art: before reading his poem ‘Clocks of the Dead,’ he admitted that he did not remember when he had originally written it.

‘Just thinking about it, I forgot to wind the clock,’ Simic read. ‘We woke up in the dark.’

Steven Brush, a writer from Rockport, said he particularly enjoyed the influence of Simic’s Serbian-American background.

‘I attended for the poetry and the language,’ Brush said. ‘The fact that he is Eastern European makes his writing especially unique, as his ethnicity comes through in his irony and his humor.’

Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student Vivek Sharma, an Indian national, said she personally understands the difficulty of writing poetry in a second language.

‘I am a poet myself and I feel that I connect with Simic because we both come from a different place and write poetry in a language different than our mother tongue,’ Sharma said.

BU writing program lecturer Scott Challener said as a fan of Simic’s poetry, he felt ‘fortunate’ to hear him speak.

‘There is something about hearing a poem read aloud that allows you to relive the poem and think about them in a new way,’ Challener said.

College of Arts and Sciences junior Jennifer Faulk said she hoped by attending the reading, she would be inspired in writing her own poetry, like many of her fellow classmates have reported after attending other poetry readings.

‘It was pointed out in EN536, ‘Twentieth-Century American Poetry,’ that attending poetry readings helps you get a better sense of what the poets are trying to convey, that you don’t understand what they’re saying until they’re up there,’ Faulk said.

Playwright and BU alumnus Zayd Dohrn said he was happy to attend to support his wife, Dewoskin.

‘I always have enjoyed Simic’s work and have known the influence it has had on my wife’s writing,’ Dohrn said. ‘But until today, I never had an opportunity to meet him and hear him read aloud, and it was absolutely magnificent.’