|
Date 4-27-06
Contact Angela Kilcrease 601.266.4988
Hattiesburg—University
of Southern Mississippi English professors and poets Angela Ball
and Julia Johnson will present “Poetry Speaking to Art” at 4:30
p.m., May 2 at the Museum of Art. Sponsored by the Southern Miss
Department of Art and Design and Partners for the Arts, the afternoon
reading is a unique collaboration that melds both the literary arts
and visual arts.
Using the backdrop
of Southern Miss student art currently on view, the poets will be
reading poems on works by Bonnard, Redon, Rodin, Paula Modersohn-Becker,
and Anna Redwine (Johnson's cousin who recently completed her Master
of Fine Arts), among others.
“Julia and I
are both doing work by Redon and by Anna Redwine. We're not working
on the poems together, so I think it will be interesting to see
our separate takes on the same artists,” Ball said.
According to
Ball, the goal of the presentation is to “transfer one art to the
medium of a second--make a poem out of a picture” and to present
“literary art in the context of visual art, to see how the two can
cross fertilize and enliven one another.”
Ball, who teaches
in the Center for Writers at Southern Miss and is poetry editor
for Mississippi Review, is the author of four books of
poems: Kneeling Between Parked Cars (Seattle: Owl Creek
Press, 1990); Possession (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 1995);
Quartet (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press,
1995); and The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits (Carnegie
Mellon, 1999).
Her poems and
translations have appeared in many journals, including The New
Yorker, Partisan Review, The Atlantic Monthly,
Ploughshares, The New Republic, Poetry,
and Grand Street.
Johnson, a native
of New Orleans and assistant professor of English at Southern Miss,
was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, earning
her Master of Fine Arts in 1995. Her poems have appeared in such
journals as Third Coast, Poetry International,
64, and New Orleans Review.
Her first book
of poems, Naming the Afternoon, was published by Louisiana
State University Press in 2002. She has been awarded an Academy
of American Poets Prize three times and is the winner of the Fellowship
of Southern Writers' 2003 New Writing Award.
Becky Montague
of Hattiesburg, a Museum patron and volunteer, said the opportunity
to showcase the Southern Miss museum in a new way is especially
exciting. “Since I am a product of the Center for Writers, inviting
these established poets for a reading in the Museum seemed to me
the perfect collaboration,” she said.
The Museum is
located in the Fine Arts Building at the southwest corner of the
Southern Miss campus. Admission is free and open to the public.
For more information, call 601.266.5200.
For more information,
visit the Web at www.usm.edu/arts
or contact Angela Kilcrease at (601) 266-4988.
| 
