Robert Pinsky Headlines Reading

This Thursday night at 7 p.m., under the summer tent at Featherstone Center for the Arts, fans of poetry, music, nay fans of feeling deeply the joy that art brings, are in for a treat. There is a double bill featuring poet Robert Pinsky and musician Stan Strickland.

Mr. Pinksy was the United States Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000. He is the author of over 19 books, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, received the Los Angeles Book Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is currently a professor of writing at Boston University; the list of accolades goes on and on. Far better, really, to let the man’s work speak for him.

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An excerpt from his poem Jersey Rain: “Now near the end of the middle stretch of road/What have I learned? Some earthly wiles. An art./ That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad,/That once had seemed so easy to tell apart./ The source of art and woe aslant in wind/Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches./ What roadbank gullies and ruts it doesn’t mend/It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches.”

Stan Strickland is a saxophonist, flutist and actor who has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and even opened for Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. He also toured South Africa with the Village People. Truly, nothing more needs to be said after that.

The cost of the evening is $20. Doors open at 6 p.m.