Patrick Donnelly

PATRICK DONNELLY is the author of four books of poetry, Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019), Jesus Said (a chapbook from Orison Books, 2017), Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012, a Lambda Literary Award finalist), and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press). Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. With his spouse Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. The translations in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Donnelly was 2015 – 2017 poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. His website is:

www.patrickdonnellypoetry.com

Donnelly will read from his newest book, Little-Known Operas. The book includes two sequences alternating with other poems: one about Jesus (yes, that Jesus—though Donnelly’s version of Jesus seems to be a gardener, a Sufi, an esoteric Buddhist, an atheist, a Japanophile, a sufferer of ocular migraines, and a fan of Federico García Lorca), and another about the opera singer Maria Callas. When Jesus introduces the topic of Callas (as one does), the Callas sequence branches off from the Jesus sequence, and then, absurdly, recombines and argues with it. Donnelly and Stephen D. Miller will also read from their translations of Japanese poetry.