Karl Kirchwey reads from Poems of Rome  

Keats-Shelley House, Monday, June 03, 2019, 5 p.m.

Karl Kirchwey edited the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series volume entitled  Poems of Rome (2018). It includes English-language poems about the Eternal City from the Renaissance to the present by poets including Louise Bogan, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Browning, Byron, Jorie Graham, Thomas Hardy, Felicia Hemans, Keats, Czeslaw Milosz, Adrienne Rich, Christina Rossetti, Shelley, May Swenson, Swinburne, Richard Wilbur, Oscar Wilde, and Wordsworth. It also includes translations of Latin poems by Horace, Martial and Ovid, and of Italian poets including G.G. Belli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, and Giorgio Vigolo. The book is arranged for the convenience of the visitor according to “Places,” “Buildings and Monuments,” “Picture Galleries and Museums,” and “Churches,” and includes as well poems about sites outside of Rome. Karl Kirchwey will read from this anthology as well as from his own most recent book,  Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems.

Karl Kirchwey is the author of seven books of poems, including two specifically situated in Rome: The Engrafted Word (1998) and Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems (2017). His translation of French poet Paul Verlaine’s first book was published as Poems Under Saturn (2011), and he is working on translations of a selection of poems by Italian poet Giovanni Giudici (1924-2011). Karl Kirchwey has received the Rome Prize in Literature and the Cato Prize as well as grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations. He was Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome (2010-13), and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston University, where he is currently serving as Associate Dean of Faculty for the Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.