Award-winning poets Maggie Dietz (GRS’97) (from left), Carl Phillips (GRS’93), and Erin Belieu (GRS’95), alums of BU’s Creative Writing Program, will participate in the final Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading on March 5. Dietz photo by Meg Moore; Phillips photo by Reston Allen; Belieu photo by Gesi Schilling

Poetry

Final Lowell Poetry Reading to Feature Three Distinguished BU Poets

Series launched by Robert Pinsky 20 years ago draws to a close as he prepares to retire from BU

Since it launched in 2005, BU’s Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading has brought some of the nation’s most distinguished poets to campus—Nobel Prize winners in literature, like Seamus Heaney and Louise Glück, US poet laureates, like Robert Hass and Rita Dove, MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, like C. D. Wright and Kay Ryan, and numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, among them John Ashbery, Edward P. Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Natasha Trethewey, Jorie Graham, and Paul Muldoon. 

The series was the brainchild of Robert Pinsky, a BU William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, and three-time US poet laureate, and Nancy Livingston (COM’69), who along with her husband, Fred M. Levin, funded the readings. Notable guest readers were joined by recent MFA graduates, who also read from their works.

“The hope was that students in the Creative Writing Program would have specific, practical examples, every semester, of a life in art rooted in what we do at BU, and extending beyond the degree program,” Pinsky says. “I think that the readings have fulfilled that idea, emphasized by the Q&A sessions with MFA students talking with the visitor poet and the recent alum who were chosen to read each semester.”

The series took its inspiration from Room 222, the central classroom for BU’s Creative Writing Program at 236 Bay State Road. There, former US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Lowell, for whom the room is named, taught students such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. 

As Pinsky prepares to retire from BU, the Lowell Poetry series is drawing to an end, with a final reading being held on Wednesday. Pinsky invited three distinguished BU MFA alums to headline this final event: Carl Phillips (GRS’93), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020; Erin Belieu (GRS’95), director of creative writing at the University of Houston and cofounder of the feminist literary organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; and Maggie Dietz, cofounder with Pinsky of the Favorite Poem Project and an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. 

“These three represent for me the life of the MFA program since I arrived from Berkley in 1989,” Pinsky says. “I associate them with community spirit and leadership, along with excellence in poetry and in teaching.” 

The three poets credit their former teacher and mentor with providing invaluable advice that continues to resonate in their work today. 

Phillips was unhappily ensconced in a PhD program at Harvard, studying the classics, when his first collection of poems was about to be published. He decided to apply to BU’s Creative Writing Program, but learned that the application deadline had passed. His partner at the time called Pinsky and asked if they could bring the manuscript for Phillips’ book to his house. “I think my partner pretended to be me—I wouldn’t have dared to do this,” Phillips says. “Robert gave us the address and said he would take a look. We got to the house, Robert reached for the manuscript, and then closed the door. That evening I got a call from him welcoming me to the program.” 

He says Pinsky didn’t speak much when students first workshopped their poems, preferring that they engage in discussion among themselves. “But then, at the end, Robert would always have a comment that would seem to be a refreshingly straightforward and blanched summation of his own opinions of a poem,” says Phillips, who also has fond memories of the “salons” that Pinsky would set up each month at a coffee shop so that students could stop by and show him new work. 

“Robert would not only give crucial feedback on poems, but would also talk more generally about the writing life,” Phillips says. It was most likely at one of those coffee shop meetings that Pinsky first mentioned a visiting job he thought Phillips might want to apply for at Washington University, St. Louis. Phillips landed the job—and stayed for 33 years.

Phillips is the author of 17 collections of poetry, including his most recent, Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024).

Studying at BU “was truly life-changing for me,” Belieu says. “To be mentored by a genius like Robert, to forge a lifetime friendship with Carl Phillips, to have the fellowship of many other great poets in the Boston and Cambridge community…to be part of BU’s fabled poetic history—it was a heady and inspiring thing to sit in that classroom on Bay State Road and know you had been welcomed into hallowed poetic ground.” 

From Pinsky, she learned “how poetic invention comes from discipline, compression, a bracing and truthful lack of sentimentality—how one frees a poem into surprise, interesting thought, and vivid imagery through those rigors.” 

Belieu took those lessons to heart. She says that when crafting a poem, she looks for a sense of drama, the beginning of an argument, a palpable sense of stance that “woos me into staying there… I prefer a poem that actually starts. Readers are busy people, so let’s get moving! I seem to want an energy that immediately draws the reader in.” 

Belieu is the author of five collections of poems. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times.

Dietz had just finished the MFA program at BU when she began working with Pinsky on what would become the Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans of all ages and backgrounds to share their favorite poems. The project, begun by Pinsky during his first term as US Poet Laureate and now housed at BU, produced more than 50 mini-documentaries and three anthologies that the two edited together. 

“It was hectic and complicated—and thrilling,” Dietz recalls. “Sometimes it felt like we were building a national project out of pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks.”

Dietz says Pinsky was an inspiration to her as a teacher. “Robert was never looking to expand the audience for his work through teaching,” she says. “He didn’t want students to write like him. Good thing, because his work—the energy of its measures, its feisty elegance—is inimitable.” Instead, he’d dip into his reservoir of knowledge of poetry and share poems he loved, she says. “He was insightful, but not insistent in his responses to our poems. He trusted us to be artists, to figure some things out for ourselves.”

Pinsky is eager to hear what his three former students have selected to read Wednesday night: “I treasure the joy I have gotten from their masterful poetry books, most recently Carl’s Then the War, Erin’s Slant Six, and Maggie’s soon-to-appear If You Would Let Me.” 

And he’s looking back with pride on the legacy of the poetry reading series.

“In the spirit of the Favorite Poem Project, the series was both practical and idealistic, respectful of the past and serious about the future,” Pinsky says. “I’m confident that with the completion of the reading series, the Favorite Poem Project will continue to inspire new students and new undertakings at BU.” 

The Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading, featuring Carl Phillips (GRS’93), Erin Belieu (GRS’95), and Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), is Wednesday, March 5, at 7:30 pm in the Castle Room at BU Hillel, 213 Bay State Road. A book-signing and reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public. Find more information here. 

The Robert Lowell Memorial Reading series was established by Nancy Livingston (COM’69) and her husband, Fred M. Levin, through the Shenson Foundation, in memory of Ben and A. Jess Shenson.