The 1995-96 President's Lecture Series opens with a one-two punch with poet John Ashbery and playwright John Guare. Ashbery speaks at 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 27, in Room 101 of the Salomon Center for Teaching. Guare follows Ashbery at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30 in Room 101 of Salomon Center.
Introduced in the spring of 1992 by President Gregorian, the series provides support for talks and presentations by internationally distinguished writers, scholars and artists, who visit the campus at the personal invitation of the president. Previous lectures have included presentations by historian Noel Annan, actress Claire Bloom and poet Maya Angelou.
After Ashbery and Guare, the schedule is:
Ashbery is the only American poet to win all three major annual literary prizes - the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award - for one book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship; in 1992 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the largest poetry prizes in the United States, and the Feltrinelli Prize. He was also the first recipient of the Horst Bienek Prize for poetry, issued in 1991 by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Ashbery has been a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 1988.
Ashbery is the author of 16 previous collections of poetry, including And the Stars Were Shining (1993), Hotel Lautréamont (1992), Flow Chart (1991), and April Galleons (1987), as well as a volume of art criticism, Reported Sightings (1989). He is co-author, along with James Schuyler, of the novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969). His latest collection of poetry, Can You Hear, Bird, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month.
In 1989-90, Ashbery was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard and is currently the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.
John Guare
Guare is best-known for the 1990 Broadway play turned feature film, Six Degrees of Separation. That play received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1990 and an Olivier Best Play Award in 1993.
Born in 1938, Guare is of the generation of American playwrights critics persist in calling "promising" and comparing with Edward Albee. After winning an Obie in the 1967-68 season for Muzeeka and being named the next season's "most promising playwright" in Variety's poll of New York's drama critics for Cop-Out, Guare went on to produce two of his most successful works in the course of a single year. The House of Blue Leaves won both an Obie and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best American Play, 1970-71. Two Gentlemen of Verona was awarded the Tony and the New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best musical of 1971-72, the Tony for best book of a musical, the Drama Desk Award and the Variety poll award for best lyricist. Critics praised The House of Blue Leaves for its savage, penetrating farce and Two Gentlemen of Verona for its inspired lunacy.
After producing his first play at age 11 for an audience of friends and family, Guare pursued his interest in writing by attending the theater weekly and listening to the original cast recordings of musicals, his favorite dramatic form, to learn how they were structured. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1960 and attended Yale Drama School, receiving his M.F.A. in 1963.
Other Guare plays include Landscape of the Body (1977), Bosoms and Neglect (1979), In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes (1981), Gardenia (1982), The Talking Dog (1985), Moon Over Miami (1989), and the Tony Award-nominated Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992).
And for all the days it doesn't happen
something does happen,
solid and nutritional like a wrapped steak
tossed on a counter. At first I couldn't believe the thirst;
soon, so soon, it becomes average and airy,
a fixture. Precept to be toyed with.
The road started to get rough with me.
A mere 800 feet away the car wept
on its blocks
and little Peter came and looked around and went away.
It was kind of a mistake and he went away.
It was a kind mistake, breezes over dashboard.
Twin violins sew
a fine seam;
a paw slips over the face of the clock,
laggards and dudgeons in between.
All I meant to suggest was the negative of what has
been done surges and slops against fifth-floor windows
in the time it takes to anchor a tricycle.
And we full of such courtesy,
blind to the days and it seems their systems the night,
teetering on a board's edge;
sure and the unrolled film fans out
in suns like a dolphin or a skate's wing.
After all who blubbered the truth
It wasn't I