Carol Muske-Dukes: "Twin Cities" -The Provost's Writers Series
Visions and Voices
Summary:
Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at USC, former poet laureate of California and recipient of numerous awards. Muske-Dukes will read from her latest book of poetry, Twin Cities, which has been described as “stunning,” “masterful” and “heart-stopping.” She will also discuss her recent anthology, Crossing State Lines: An American Renga.
Description:
“Exploding with capacity and ambition, Carol Muske-Dukes’ new poems are the strongest yet from a poet whose work has long been essential reading. Twin Cities’ formal and architectural intelligence is stunning, as well as heart-stopping in its insight into ‘how damage is made.’ The richness of the language is made to carry the maximum bearable amount of emotion—political, spiritual, social, familial, erotic—via brightly-lit imagery which astounds with its originality, felicity, and honesty.” —Jorie Graham
Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at USC, former poet laureate of California and recipient of numerous awards. Muske-Dukes will read from her latest book of poetry, Twin Cities, and will also discuss her recent anthology, Crossing State Lines: An American Renga. Twin Cities is an emotionally rich book of poems about how things double—by reflection, by reproduction, by severance. The poems embark from the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, divided by a legendary river, and move on to the parallel histories of a life lived and a life imagined—and the random intersection of the two. Lit by loss, these moving poems navigate between the poles of love and grief, curse and blessing, abandonment and rescue—they are two, and they are one. Crossing State Lines: An American Renga is a poetic relay race across the continent: 54 poets responding to ideas of America—and to each other. This is a collaborative journey of impressions—from the election and inauguration of President Obama, through foreclosures, job losses, chords of country music and bombs in Baghdad. USC Provost Elizabeth Garrett will introduce the evening, followed by readings and a conversation with Muske-Dukes moderated by Dana Goodyear, a staff writer for The New Yorker, professor in USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program and author of two collections of poems, Honey and Junk and The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard.
Muske-Dukes is the coeditor of two anthologies and author of eight books of poetry, four novels and two collections of essays. In addition to Twin Cities and Crossing State Lines, her books of poetry include An Octave Above Thunder: New & Selected Poems and Sparrow, a National Book Award finalist. Her four novels are Channeling Mark Twain, Life After Death, Saving St. Germ and Dear Digby. Her collections of essays include Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood and Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self. Many of her collections have been New York Times Most Notable Books or selected for yearly best-book lists. She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her work appears in numerous publications, from the New Yorker to Los Angeles magazine, and she is anthologized widely. She is a professor of English and creative writing and founding director of the PhD program in literature and creative writing at USC. She has received many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes.
The Provost’s Writers Series highlights the extraordinary talents of USC authors. The series provides opportunities for students and the community to engage with USC authors, learn about the incredible diversity of their work and celebrate the written word.
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Photo: Carlos Puma