Scottish poet and scholar Robert Crawford will read from his work at 4 p.m. today, and distinguished poet Bin Ramke will read from his work at 8 p.m. Sept. 29.
Both events for the Writing Program Reading Series are free and open to the public and will take place in Hurst Lounge in Duncker Hall.
Crawford is the author of five poetry collections: A Scottish Assembly (1990), Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999) and The Tip of My Tongue (2003). He has published several volumes of literary criticism on Scottish literature and poetry and is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Poetry From Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (with Simon Armitage, 1998) and The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (with Mick Imlah, 2000).
In 1984, Crawford was a founder of the international magazine Verse and later served as poetry editor for the Edinburgh publisher Polygon.
“Like his critical prose, Crawford’s poetry describes what happens when poetry’s old languages of romantic and religious experience intervene in new worlds of technology and science,” said Marina MacKay, Ph.D., assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences.
“Witty and clear-sighted about what nationality might mean in an era of transnational opportunities and pressures, Crawford’s poetic version of Scotland as a marginalized territory and an old imperial sinner manages to be both introspective and internationalist.”
Crawford was born in Belshill, Lanarkshire, Scotland, in 1959, and educated at Glasgow University and at Oxford. A fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he is a professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St. Andrews.
Ramke is the author of eight books of poems, including Matter (2004), Airs, Waters, Places (2001), Wake (1999), Massacre of the Innocents (1995), The Erotic Light of Gardens (1989), The Language Student (1986) and White Monkeys (1981). His first book, The Difference Between Night and Day, won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1978.
He teaches literature and writing at the University of Denver and edits Denver Quarterly.
Born in east Texas, Ramke spent much of his youth in south Louisiana among his Cajun relatives, including several summers on a houseboat on the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge.
He studied mathematics one summer at the University of Texas with R.L. Moore, inventor of point-set topology, and for a time worked with the sculptor Armin Scheler while a student at Louisiana State University.
For more information, call 935-7130.