Geoffrey Brock

The Department of English and Creative Writing at The University of Tulsa welcomes poet and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, Geoffrey Brock, for a reading celebrating the launch of his third poetry book, After, on Monday April 8 at 7:00 pm in the Tyrrell Hall auditorium on the TU campus.

This event showcases Brock’s decades-long journey as a poet and translator, offering an elegy for his father, who was also a poet. The collection delves into after poems, a form of translation engaging not only with Italian poets but also with English-language poets like Keats and Seamus Heaney.

Magic City Books will partner as the bookseller for this event which is free and open to the public. Copies of After will be available for purchase at the event and starting April 9 at Magic City Books in downtown Tulsa.

About After

“Like Frost before him, Brock has the power to make earthbound words take flight.”
–Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

The title of Geoffrey Brock’s third poetry collection, After, works in two ways. Many of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock’s father, who was also a poet. And many are in some way “after”–as in, in the manner of–other poems or works of art. Such texts, often called “versions” or “imitations,” have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design.”

Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but distinct tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it’s a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets owe debts to other poets as surely as each of us does to those who raised us, and After is a partial account of such personal and poetic inheritances.

Geoffrey Brock, born in Atlanta in 1964, is an American poet, translator, editor, and professor.
He is the author of two previous collections of poems, Weighing Light and Voices Bright Flags; the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry; and the translator of various books of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His poems have appeared in journals including Poetry magazine, Paris Review, Copper Nickel, Yale Review, and Best American Poetry, and he has translated authors including Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, Italo
Calvino, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giovanni Pascoli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Cesare Pavese.

His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. His translations have received ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry, the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, the MLA’s Lois Roth Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Prize, the ATA’s Lewis Galantière Translation Award, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Prize. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2006 he has taught in the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing &
Translation, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English and the founding editor of The Arkansas International. He currently divides his time between Arkansas and Montreal.