Lecturer William Corbett, whose "confiding, bemused and warmly observant poems flow, soar and stride" (Donna Seaman, Booklist), will kick off the 1996-97 "poetry@mit" series on Thursday, Sept. 26 at 7:30pm in Bartos Theater (Building E15).
Mr. Corbett, who teaches creative writing, poetry and expository prose at MIT, is poetry editor of Grand Street. His published poetry collections include New & Selected Poems, On Blue Note (Zoland, 1989) and Don't Think: Look (Zoland, 1991); his works of nonfiction include Literary New England (Faber and Faber, 1993) and Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir (Zoland, 1994). Mr. Corbett's poetry, book reviews and art criticism have appeared in Arts, Art News, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Agni and elsewhere.
"Corbett has the ability to capture the world in a moment, to note something large with such specificity and freshness it is as if we see it for the first time," wrote John Skoyles in The Jacaranda Review. Michael Palmer, in a recent issue of Agni, wrote, "It is not, finally, the bright, static image he is after, rested perfection, but the flux of the phenomenal world," remarking that Mr. Corbett's work "reminds us that the play of the visible, even the familiar, is endless in its reach, as is the play of language."
Sponsored by MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and the literature section, the reading is free and open to the public. For more information, call x3-9469 or visit the Web page at
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 25, 1996.
