Wabash College will host James Longenbach who will give a talk on "Pound at Home: the Crawfordsville State of Mind" at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 20, in Room 101 (Lovell Lecture Room) in Baxter Hall.
Longenbach is a poet and critic whose most recent book of poems, Draft of a Letter, is about the vicissitudes of belief—belief not in what is distant and strange but in what is close and familiar: our bodies, our words. His most recent critical work, The Art of the Poetic Line, is an account of the work of lineation in free-verse, syllabic, and metered poetry (ranging from Shakespeare to Ashbery). He has also written widely about modern and postmodern poetry, sometimes emphasizing the historicity of poetic language (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things) but also exploring the ways in which poems resist their historical situation (The Resistance to Poetry). Longenbach is the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.
His talk, which marks the centennial of Ezra Pound’s brief tenure at Wabash, is free and open to the public.