New York University’s Creative Writing Program will host “A Tribute to Jack Gilbert,” celebrating this master poet’s late-in-life poetry collection, The Dance Most of All, published recently by Knopf, on Tuesday, May 12, at 7 p.m. The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place at the NYU Cantor Film Center, 38 E. 8th Street. For more information, the public may call 212.998.8816 or visit www.cwp.fas.nyu.edu.
Joining Gilbert in this special poetry reading are Jim Finnegan, Linda Gregg, Mary Karr, Henry Lyman, Meghan O’Rourke, and Gerald Stern.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1925, Gilbert published his first book, Views of Jeopardy, in 1962, winning the Yale Younger Poets Series prize. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, he traveled abroad, touring 15 countries as a lecturer on American literature for the U.S. State Department. Nearly 20 years after completing his first book, he published his second, i.
Gilbert is also the author of Refusing Heaven, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 and recipient of The Los Angeles Times Book Award. His other books include Transgressions: Selected Poems and The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992. His poetry has been featured in The American Poetry Review, The Quarterly, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker, among other publications.
The poet James Dickey has said of Gilbert’s work, “He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.”
“A Tribute to Jack Gilbert” is co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, Poets House, and Alfred A. Knopf.