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Revisiting Katharine Coles' "Flight" On Wednesday's Access Utah

Red Hen Press

Former Utah Poet Laureate and current Professor of English at the University of Utah, Katharine Coles is author of two novels and several volumes of poetry. The latest, published in March by Red Hen Press, is titled “Flight.”

 

She directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature and is recipient of both an Individual Writers Fellowship and a New Forms Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen 2013), was written under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Katharine Coles will join Tom Williams for the hour on Tuesday’s Access Utah.

She has published poetry and prose in such journals as Poetry, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, North American Review, and the New Republic.

The journal Image describes her work this way: “In her elegant, approachable poems, Katharine Coles addresses subjects as diverse as the geology of Antarctica, eating dinner, mathematics, the decomposition of corpses, and biblical stories of creation and annunciation.

Her language is graceful and precise, with nothing extra and without undue compression, streamlined as a beautiful sports car. It conveys rigor without stiffness, intellect without coldness. Among her recurring themes is the mystery and dignity of the natural world, which throughout her work bears a beauty and significance that exist quite apart from our willingness to notice them.

A second theme is encounter, or the meeting of two selves across a divide: human and animal, human and human, human and divine. In the poems, other selves resist being fully known; they keep their mystery intact, and yet the barrier between selves is permeable at certain times and places. Coles is a formal poet who isn’t bound by form; at times, a form’s strictures, as in the loosely constructed pantoum ‘Annunciation,’ allow her to reveal a near-mystical dimension of encounter.”

Katharine Coles has been working with computer scientists to create tools for visualizing sonic patterns in poetry.  “The visualizations, which work in real time on any poem the user chooses, are meant as companions to close reading, but early users are also using them to compose and revise poems of their own.”

Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.