Peter Balakian
Nonfiction Reading: Saturday, October 24
6:30 p.m. Bucknell Hall
Peter Balakian is the author of many books including June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (HarperCollins 2001) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2004), New York Times Best Seller. His memoir, Black Dog of Fate was a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher's Weekly, and was recently issued in a 10th anniversary edition.
Balakian is also the author of a book on the American poet Theodore Roethke and the co-translator of the Armenian poet Siamanto's Bloody News From My Friend, and co-translator of Girgoris Balakian's Armenian Golgotha. He is the recipient of many awards and civic citations, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. He has appeared widely on national television and radio (ABC World News Tonight, PBS, Charlie Rose, CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, Fresh Air, etc), and foreign editions of his work have appeared in Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Dutch, Greek, German, Italian, and Turkish.
A native of New Jersey, Balakian holds a BA from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. He is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Colgate University, and was the first Director of Colgate's Center for Ethics and World Societies.
From Black Dog of Fate, Basic Books, 1997, 10th anniversary edition, 2009
Sometime in the fall of my senior year, I began to correspond
with Allen Ginsberg. I sent him my poems, and out of the blue he
wrote back with comments and suggestions. When I invited him
to come and read his poems at Bucknell, he answered promptly
through his agent that he would be there on April 5 and that the
fee would be $1,500. Bucknell's president, Charles Watts, a literary
critic himself, was excited about Ginsberg's visit and agreed to
fund it. As the dogwoods bloomed by the fountain on the academic
quad, we read Howl. Even my friends, who were students of
Professor Fell and read only one thick black book by Martin Heidegger
called Being and Time, read Howl.
With his beard and hair bushing at the sides of his balding
head and his horn-rimmed glasses, Ginsberg looked serious and
vulnerable as he hobbled onto the porch of 208 South Seventh
Street with a broken leg in a walking cast under his blue-jean overalls,
accompanied by his friend Peter Orlovsky, whose biceps
bulged from a T-shirt with a huge American flag on the front.
They arrived at 4:30, and I wasn't surprised when my mother
drove up a few minutes later in our Vista Cruiser station wagon.
She told me on the phone the night before that she was thinking
about making a visit to her alma mater and that this seemed like
the perfect excuse, and she said she would bring dinner. I must
have been expecting her, because all I had on hand was an aluminum
bowl of Lipton's instant soup onion dip, some potato
chips, and a couple of gallons of cheap wine. She walked into my
college apartment bright and cheery as some friends were passing
joints and Ginsberg and Orlovsky were holding forth with teachers
and students. My mother: in a blue suit and suede pumps, carrying
two trays of lasagna covered with aluminum foil, some
French bread in white bags, plastic bags of lettuce, and a jar of her
own salad dressing.
