The Arts

John Ashbery was memorialized as one of America's premiere poets upon his passing earlier this month. English professor James Longenbach reflects on a long friendship with Ashbery and his impact on poetry and literature.

The familiar sound of the bells in tower of Rush Rhees Library will be silenced for the next few weeks, while parts of the Hopeman Memorial Carillon are under restoration.

Two undergraduates are spending their summer analyzing a recording that was first released nearly four decades before they were born.

Two undergraduates have joined a summer research project focused on building a machine-learning interface that generates musical scores from audio files.

Waddell joins the faculty of the Department of Music as the director of orchestral activities. She will teach and also conduct both the Symphony and Chamber Orchestras.

Poet Jennifer Grotz, a professor of English, has been named the next director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. She is the first woman to serve as director of the oldest American conference for writers.

How do you learn to play an instrument comprised of 50 bells that lives at the top of a library tower? Practice, practice, practice. A student team has finished building a new digital carillon that will allow students to learn to play tough pieces while hearing real carillon sounds.

This spring’s production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child marks the first time that a student has directed a play for the International Theatre Program.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Galway Kinnell ’49 (MA) was often compared to Walt Whitman for his lyricism. When he died in 2014, Rochester Review remembered him with a selection of his thoughts on the practice of poetry.

Seniors final art projects are a culmination of study in contemporary visual art-making through practice, presentation, and analysis.

For more than 50 years, the Plutzik Reading Series has brought Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, and National Book Award winners to River Campus.

Professor James Longenbach's next books—Earthling  and Lyric Knowledge—will soon be released. This National Poetry Month, Longenbach reminds us, “the best poems ever written constitute our future.”