EVENTS: 12 April 2007, Thursday, American corner, at 13.30.

POETRY READING BY DR ROGER CRAIK
Moderator: Professor Dr David Jenkins
Coordinator: Milena Katsarska

Roger Craik, Associate Professor of English at Kent State, Ashtabula Campus, was been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at Sofia University, in Bulgaria, for the Spring Term, 2007. He is teaching two courses: Creative Writing to undergraduates and Contemporary British Poetry to master’s students. When given the grant, Craik responded with both delight and surprise. “I so enjoyed Sofia when I was there last year, with its stately university with marble banisters and old wooden desks, not to mention the art galleries and cheap coffee houses, and the friendly faculty and students.” This is Craik’s second professional visit to Bulgaria. In the summer 2005 he was invited to give lectures in Sofia and in Veliko Turnovo on the British poet Philip Larkin, and also read his own poetry there. It was on the strength of these readings that the Sofia department invited him to apply for the Fulbright Scholarship. Mr. Craik has worked at the Ashtabula Campus since 1991. He was born and raised in England and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton. He taught at the Turkish universities of Bursa and Izmir before being awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He has written three books about literature and 15 full-length articles, including John Donne: Selected Poetry and Prose which he co-edited, Sir Thomas Urquhart: Polyglot, Adventurer, and Translator of Rabelais and a number of articles on twentieth-century poetry, such as those on Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin that follow this biography. While, as he says, he has always preferred to write about “anything he finds interesting and cares about,” at present he prefers not to engage in academic writing. His passion is for his own poetry. From 2002-2005, the Ginninderra Press in Australia published three of his books, and since then he has completed two other collections, a chapbook, and has given many readings in Ohio and out of state. In 2006, he joined the faculty of the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts program in poetry, run jointly by Kent State, Cleveland State, Youngstown State and the University of Akron.

A POEM BY ROGER CRAIK

Fairuz

Her voice sings the impossibility
of woman eager, throaty, offering herself
here in Yildiz Lokantasi restaurant
in the old Jewish quarter of Izmir, Turkey,
where Ahmet sits across me and pours
a third raki for himself, separates
the sole from its spine, on the gleaming tablecloth
beneath fluorescent lights. There’s only us here now
in the mid-evening, and a clutch of businessmen
loose-tied, their white shirts rolled up to the elbows, over mezeler,
and still the voice sings promise of divan,
perfume, and the urgent guttural words taboo, commands
of yearning in her long deep groan. Ahmet’s talking on
about Serpil or maybe Gulin twenty years ago
and when he studies in Manchester, England,
where, Roger, all the girls were beautiful,
or some of them, not all, but whores. And still her voice
is breathing all around in Arabic, and even though
I’m only thirty-three, and even though
I’ve told myself I’ve given up desiring love,
I long in my poorly-cobbled disappointing shoes to rove
these streets I think of as my own
to picture her behind one shutter, just a crack ajar, two candles
guttering, and her fleshy tight-ringed finger
beckoning to me.

TWO CRITICAL ESSAYS BY DR ROGER CRAIK

Green and dying in chains: Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Golden Age.’
Animals and birds in Philip Larkin’s poetry

On behalf of The Department of British and American Studies and the American Corner at Plovdiv University, we would like to express our gratitude to the poet in residence Roger Craik for his poetry reading and stimulating discussion thereafter and the Fulbright Commission in Bulgaria for their support of the event.