Mark Wunderlich to read for Katonah Poetry Series on May 4

Award-winning poet Mark Wunderlich lives in the Hudson Valley. BEOWOLF SHEEHAN PHOTO

The Katonah Poetry Series and Katonah Village Library will present award-winning poet Mark Wunderlich on Sunday, May 4. 

Wunderlich is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which is “MATEY,” forthcoming from Greywolf Press. 

In a recent interview for the Katonah Poetry Series, Wunderlich said this about his work and life as a poet: “If I once thought I had sacrificed something to be a poet, I don’t think that anymore. Being a writer in the culture is the greatest thing I know. I am infinitely lucky that mostly I get to work with smart and interesting people. I get to travel. I get to write whatever I want, read anything I want. I don’t struggle. So much of what is good in my life has come to me through my work as a poet, and while I live a rather retiring life rusticating in upstate New York, my imagination is allowed to roam free.”

Wunderlich’s poetry is known for evoking a strong sense of place, which he also addressed in the interview.

“My great treasure as a writer has been my place of origin,” he said. “I grew up in the rural Midwest, in another century, and in a time when Buffalo County, Wisconsin, was largely a place passed over by art and literature. I had a childhood in which I could wander in woods and swamps and over fields, and there were always dogs and horses and livestock around, as well as the many wild creatures which everyone in my family was attuned to, watched, sometimes stalked, talked about and revered. I was expected to understand the cycles of planting, cultivating, reaping, breeding, slaughtering etc., that everyone in this world understood.”

“These cycles were also tied to holidays, to liturgy, to Christian doctrine,” he continued. “It was an isolated and isolating childhood, but it was also a stimulating and rich one, rich with vivid, unmediated experience, and as a child I was not spared either the beauty or the brutality of that world. It was a place where no one was indolent, where you learned many practical skills, and everyone worked, all that time. I also grew up listening to my elders as they told stories, gossiped, instructed, preached, and those rural voices with the particularities of a strong regional dialect continue to live inside me.”

The reading will begin at 4 p.m. at the Katonah Village Library, located at 26 Bedford Road, Katonah, and will be followed by a brief Q&A. 

The Katonah Poetry Series has been showcasing the world’s best poets for more than 50 years.