|
News Release
Office of News and Information
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-2692
Phone: (410) 516-7160
Fax (410) 516-5251
|
February 9, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Leslie Rice
lnr@jhu.edu
|
|
Hopkins Reading, John Irwin's
"Just Let Me Say This About That"
John T. Irwin, noted literary critic and Decker Professor in
the Humanities at The
Johns Hopkins University, will give a reading of his comic,
lyrical narrative poem,
Just Let Me Say This About That, at noon on Wed., Feb. 24,
in Shriver Hall on
the university's Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St., in
Baltimore.
Just Let Me Say This About That, written under Irwin's pen
name "John
Bricuth," is a 2,076 line poem set in iambic pentameter and
written entirely in
contemporary American idiom. It takes the form of a press
conference with three
questioners, Bird, Fox and Fish, who address the person at the
podium as "Sir." Sir is
either God, the president of the United States or everyone's
father. At first, these almost
Aesopian reporters begin with matters of the state but soon make
it clear that what they
really want to know is the meaning of life.
The poem is described by Baltimore poet Josephine Jacobson as
"distinguished work ...
language used brilliantly ... tragic and comic ... dynamic,
bitter, consoling, but always
fascinating ... a compelling and genuinely important work."
Irwin, a former editor of The Georgia Review, edits the
fiction and poetry series
at Johns Hopkins and was chairman of the university's Writing
Seminars for nearly 20 years. His most recent critical work
is The Mystery to a
Solution, which won Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize
for the best book in
the humanities in 1994 and the Modern Language Association's
Scaglione Prize for the
best scholarly book in comparative literature.
This reading is part of the Wednesday Noon Series presented by
the Johns Hopkins Office of Special Events. Admission is
free. For further
information, call the Office of Special Events at
410-516-7157.
Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the
World Wide Web at
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/
Information on automatic e-mail delivery
of science and medical news releases is available at the
same address.
|
Go to
Headlines@HopkinsHome Page
|