Poet Fred Marchant will read from his poems on Thursday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. in Arts 215.
The reading, sponsored by the English department, is free and open to the public.
Marchant is author of three books of poems: Tipping Point (1993), Full Moon Boat (2000), and House on Water, House in Air (2002). He was one of the first Marine officers to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam.
He directs the creative writing program at Suffolk University in Boston, and he is a teaching affiliate at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Writing of Tipping Point, Tom Sleigh observed that “In the spirit of Wilfred Owen [this] is a book seared by personal and historical fact. The poet powerfully interweaves meditations on his own service in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam era with what he calls the ‘wars in souls.' . . . Many artists are eager to assume the mantle of witness, as if will or ambition could do the work of experience and imagination. In contrast, the gravity, modesty, and moral questioning in Marchant's poems reveal a mind committed to a version of history that is resolutely human scale.”
Maxine Hong Kingston wrote of Full Moon Boat that “these poems break open the heart, so we can weep in compassion for all our lives . . . the reader will finish Full Moon Boat an enlightened being.”
Marchant's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in newspapers, journals, anthologies, including AGNI, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. He was the recipient of the Words Works Washington Prize.