Michigan native and poet Bob Hicok will join fellow poet and Michigander Carolyn Forche for a poetry reading set on Grand Valley State University’s Pew Campus today.

Hicok, who hails from Grand Ledge and is currently a professor at Virginia Technological University, is one of Michigan’s foremost poets. His work has appeared in outlets such as the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and his most recent accolade came in the form of the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize of Poetry from the Library of Congress for a piece titled “This Clumsy Living.”

“Some of the poems I’m likely to read are set in Michigan, so it will feel like bringing them home, as much as me,” Hicok said. “More than me, really: a finished poem seems less mine than its own thing, its own life. While I feel defined, in some senses, by place, it’s on a smaller scale than a state. My yard. A tree. I’ll visit spots on campus to see how they’ve changed, and expect that, like a man coming back to a place he knew as a child, the big hill won’t seem so big, but I’ll still remember tearing down it full-bore on my tricycle.”

However, it’s the art form itself Hicok loves above all.

“It’s so plastic,” he said. “I think it’s the most expansive and open of art forms, the most democratic. You don’t need an easel or stone or film camera or theater to do it. You need paper, pencil — hell, people have written poetry with chalk and dirt and other things I won’t go into. It rewards honesty and quirkiness. It depends on immediacy and passion. It’s wide too, in the ways you can come at it, in the many kinds of poems you can write.”

He was set to be joined by Great Britian’s Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, but Alison Granucci, president of Blue Flowers Arts, said Duffy had to drop out due to a “family illness.”

However, Forche is ready to step in.

“I will be reading a few older poems, but mostly focusing on a new manuscript-in-progress,” she said. “When I read, I feel that the poems come alive in another way, and the audience shares this feeling. We are alive in another way. Poetry readings are communal gatherings as magical as theater and as quieting as church.”

Forche, who is a Detroit native, said she is excited to return home for this event.

“This will be a really magical experience for me,” she said. “So many things come into my poems as if they were breathed into language: early in my life, the poems came from my Central European grandmother, Anna; my childhood in Michigan with its wild lakes, church bells and apple orchards; winter was often the season of my poems, as Michiganders would understand; and later, I wrote about wilderness, and after I went to El Salvador, I wrote about what I experienced there. As a poet, my history is my inspiration.”

“The Fall Arts Celebration: Poetry Night” will begin at 7 p.m. in the LV Eberhard Center on the GVSU Pew Campus. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, go to www.gvsu.edu/fallarts or call 616-331-2180.

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