News & Notes: Muldoon to host poetry festival next week

The Princeton Poetry Festival will bring to campus internationally acclaimed poets Durs Grunbein of Germany, Michael Hofmann of the United Kingdom and Seamus Heaney of Ireland, as well as American poets John Ashbery, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tina Chang, Lucille Clifton, Gerald Stern, Michael Dickman, Matthea Harvey, Ellen Dore Watson and Kevin Young, according to a University statement.

Distinguished graduates of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing — Galway Kinnell ’48, Sally Van Doren ’84 and Troy Jollimore GS ’99 — will also participate, the statement said.

Paul Muldoon, the chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts and the poetry editor for The New Yorker, said he had been thinking of organizing a poetry festival for years, The New York Times reported on April 17.

If the inaugural festival, which coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Creative Writing Program’s founding, is successful, the event will be held every other year, Muldoon told the Times.

The Princeton Poetry Festival was initially scheduled to complement the Dodge Poetry Festival. Muldoon said he hopes that Princeton’s festival, part of the Lewis Center’s Performance Central Program, will continue the legacy of high standards of poetry celebrated at the Dodge Foundation’s festival, the University statement said.

In January, the Dodge Foundation announced that it would cancel its 2010 poetry festival because of financial issues.

Admission to the Princeton Poetry Festival is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required. The event is sold out, according to the Lewis Center website, and unclaimed tickets will be made available to those who wait in line before the start of the festival.