Out poet Robin Becker will share highlights from her recently published collection of poems when she hosts a reading April 12 at Musehouse.
“Tiger Heron” is the seventh published collection of poems for Becker, who is also a liberal-arts research professor of English and women’s studies at the Pennsylvania State University.
Becker said her academic pursuits and the research that comes with them definitely influence her work as a poet.
“I’ve been an academic and a teaching poet all my life and as a teaching poet, I read the work of contemporary poets in my larger role as a literary citizen,” she said. “I’m a poetry editor for the ‘Women’s Review of Books’ and I write book reviews. I would say the shape of my professional life gives me the opportunity to keep up with what is happening in the world of contemporary poetry. I’m constantly influenced by what I am reading.”
Becker also credits the number of accolades, grants and fellowships she has been awarded over the years for inspiration and her growth as a poet.
“Early on, I was fortunate as a young poet to win certain accolades that boosted my confidence,” she said. “I won a Massachusetts Council for the Arts grant. I think it was $7,500 and it enabled me to take a semester off from teaching and write for a semester. So that was an example of a grant giving me both time and confidence. It reinforced my sense that I was part of a national conversation.”
Becker said her upcoming reading at Musehouse, aside from allowing her to unveil a few newer works, will focus mainly on poems from “Tiger Heron,” which explores subjects like intimate lesbian friendships over a lifespan, core human experiences and relationships among humans and other creatures.
Becker said the experiences that shape her poems are personal but speak to universal themes that anyone can relate to.
“As a poet, I kind of ground myself and my own feelings and experiences. That being said, I have a poem about the disappearing ecosystems of the Northern flying squirrel. So I have a larger social concern too for the kind of changing natural landscape that we are all involved in. I have a poem called ‘Dyke,’ which is about the word and how its meaning has changed for me over time. I suspect it’s also a poem that will have reverberations for other people, not only for that word but for the word ‘queer’ and the word ‘fag’ and the word ‘gay.’ It’s a meditation on language. In this book, there are many poems about the deaths of parents and friends and while the poems originate in my own experiences, I certainly hope those poems resonate in the lives of people for whom those experiences have a kind of quickening. We all will experience those things in our lives and I guess this book comes at a time in my life when those losses came to me. But of course they are not losses I own. They belong to all of us who will survive the death of our parents and friends. I hope that the poems that are concerned with death and loss will reverberate with other people.”
Robin Becker hosts a reading at 7:30 p.m. April 12 at Musehouse: A Center for the Literary Arts, 7924 Germantown Ave. For more information, call 267-331-9552.