“Samurai Song”
Robert Pinsky

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

来自某个角落
In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
And Mrs. W. killed themselves together,
Sitting in a roadster. Ancient unshaken pilings
And underwater chunks of still-mortared brick
In shapes like bits of puzzle strew the bottom
Where the landing was for Price’s Hotel and Theater.
And here’s where boats blew two blasts for the keeper
To shunt the iron swing-bridge. He leaned on the gears
Like a skipper in the hut that housed the works
And the bridge moaned and turned on its middle pier
To let them through. In the middle of the summer
Two or three cars might wait for the iron trusswork
Winching aside, with maybe a child to notice
A name on the stern in black-and-gold on white,
Sandpiper, Patsy Ann, Do Not Disturb,
The Idler. If a boat was running whiskey,
The bridge clanged shut behind it as it passed
And opened up again for the Coast Guard cutter
Slowly as a sundial, and always jammed halfway.
The roadbed whole, but opened like a switch,
The river pulling and coursing between the piers.
Never the same phrase twice, the catbird filling
The humid August evening near the inlet
With borrowed music that he melds and changes.
Dragonflies and sandflies, frogs in the rushes, two bodies
Not moving in the open car among the pines,
A sliver of story. The tenor at Price’s Hotel,
In clown costume, unfurls the sorrow gathered
In ruffles at his throat and cuffs, high quavers
That hold like splashes of light on the dark water,
The aria’s closing phrases, changed and fading.
And after a gap of quiet, cheers and applause
Audible in the houses across the river,
Some in the audience weeping as if they had melted
Inside the music. Never the same. In Berlin
The daughter of an English lord, in love
With Adolf Hitler, whom she has met. She is taking
Possession of the apartment of a couple,
Elderly well-off Jews. They survive the war
To settle here in the Bay, the old lady
Teaches piano, but the whole world swivels
And gapes at their feet as the girl and a high-up Nazi
Examine the furniture, the glass, the pictures,
The elegant story that was theirs and now
Is part of hers. A few months later the English
Enter the war and she shoots herself in a park,
An addled, upper-class girl, her life that passes
Into the lives of others or into a place.
The taking of lives–the Chief and Mrs. W.
Took theirs to stay together, as local ghosts.
Last flurries of kisses, the revolver’s barrel,
Shivers of a story that a child might hear
And half remember, voices in the rushes,
A singing in the willows. From across the river,
Faint quavers of music, the same phrase twice and again,
Ranging and building. Over the high new bridge
The flashing of traffic homeward from the racetrack,
With one boat chugging under the arches, outward
Unnoticed through Pleasure Bay to the open sea.
Here’s where the people stood to watch the theater
Burn on the water. All that night the fireboats
Kept playing their spouts of water into the blaze.
In the morning, smoking pilasters and beams.
Black smell of char for weeks, the ruin already
Soaking back into the river. After you die
You hover near the ceiling above your body
And watch the mourners awhile. A few days more
You float above the heads of the ones you knew
And watch them through a twilight. As it grows darker
You wander off and find your way to the river
And wade across. On the other side, night air,
Willows, the smell of the river, and a mass
Of sleeping bodies all along the bank,
A kind of singing from among the rushes
Calling you further forward in the dark.
You lie down and embrace one body, the limbs
Heavy with sleep reach eagerly up around you
And you make love until your soul brims up
And burns free out of you and shifts and spills
Down over into that other body, and you
Forget the life you had and begin again
On the same crossing–maybe as a child who passes
Through the same place. But never the same way twice.
Here in the daylight, the catbird in the willows,
The new café, with a terrace and a landing,
Frogs in the cattails where the swing-bridge was–
Here’s where you might have slipped across the water
When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.

That’s right, ROBERT PINSKY reads from his work on The Simpsons (skip to 9:58)

Lisa attends his reading at Cafe Kafka, where the sound technician recites this sound-checking verse: “roses are red, roses are red. april is the cruelest month, cruelest month,” and then shares an after-reading pizza with the former poet laureate. Pizza and poems? We’re in.

On Saturday, my classmate Emily Elert and I visited the Opera of the Future research group at the MIT Media Lab. Graduate student Elena (Elly) Jessop was kind enough to spend the day with us and demonstrate some really neat fusions of music and technology.

Now, I can’t talk in detail about absolutely everything we saw, because some of it is not yet ready for the public’s eye. To respect the Media Lab and the researchers who work there, I will only discuss what can already be found online in some form or another. I’ll be linking out a lot in case you’re interested in reading more.

The Opera of the Future group, headed by innovative composer Tod Machover, “explores concepts and techniques to help advance the future of musical composition, performance, learning, and expression.” Their work includes Hyperinstruments, traditional musical instruments enhanced by technology to actively interact with performers: as the musicians play, sensors and computers allow the instruments to interpret the nuances of live performance and accordingly change the sounds they produce, creating a new spectrum of sonic power, range and finesse. Hyperscore is a computer program that translates complex musical concepts into intuitive and colorful visual representations, making relatively sophisticated music composition a possibility for those with no formal training.

Tod Machover playing a hypercello (Credit: Tod Machover, MIT)

A large ongoing project is Death and the Powers, a new opera that makes unprecedented use of technology to modify live musical performance.  The creative team includes Machover (composer), former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky (librettist), Artistic Director of the American Repertory Theater Diane Paulus (director), and Hollywood’s Alex McDowell (production designer), who has worked on such visually stunning films as Fight Club, Minority Report and Watchmen.

Proposed Set for Death and the Powers (Credit: Opera of the Future)

The opera – currently scheduled to premiere in Monaco in September, 2010 – centers on the rich and powerful businessman Simon Powers, who dies in the second act. Powers, however, has uploaded his consciousness onto a massive computer called The System, so his essence persists throughout the performance. The stage, which largely represents the Powers household, comes alive as Simon Powers learns to manipulate the external world in his new computerized existence. Power’s daughter Miranda, his wife Evvy, and his research assistant Nicholas struggle to cope with his posthumous influence and understand the choices he made.

To achieve this transcendent effect, researchers at the Opera of the Future Group – in particular Peter Torpey - have developed what they call Disembodied Performance, a collection of technological innovations that allow an absent performer to remain actively involved in a live performance. Although Powers won’t be directly visible, his voice will be heard, his emotions will be felt, his reactions will be known. All kinds of sensors on the singer and actor playing the role of Simon Powers will wirelessly transmit data to a central computer, where the data will be used to modify the operatic performance in real time. Large bookcases onstage will present the audience with waves of color to reflect Powers’s mood, bristling in anger when a character walks by that Powers doesn’t like, for example. Ambisonic sound – which reverberates in any and every direction – will wrap the audience in song, placing them at the very center of Powers’s voice. Many-legged furniture – inspired by the beautiful kinetic sculptures of Theo Jansen – will scurry across the stage.

Elly Jessop has been working on a remarkable device for the opera called the Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis (VAMP): a glove that gives its wearer the power to modify their singing voice in real time using a gesture-based vocabulary.

Vocal Augmentation and Manipulation Prosthesis (Credit: Elly Jessop)

Currently, VAMP is a long fabric glove outfitted with pressure sensors and accelerometers that wirelessly transmit data to a computer, which interprets the gestures and – working with a microphone and speakers – changes the singer’s voice. If you want to preserve a note you’re singing for example, you use a plucking gesture to pull the note from your mouth, which signals the computer to continue playing that note as you sing something else. This allows for vocal layering and textured singing. Bending of the elbow controls volume and shaking your hand induces vibrato. You can watch Elly’s fantastic demo on her web site.

VAMP is specifically designed for Nicholas, Simon Power’s research assistant, who – according to the script – has a prosthetic arm than endows him with special abilities. Since their work is for an opera, Elly and her colleagues decided that the arm should give Nicholas special vocal abilities: thus, VAMP. Eventually the glove will look far more like a robotic arm than it does now.

Other technological innovations designed for Death and the Powers include a group of advanced animatronic-like robots, ranging in height from four to seven feet, with giant triangular lights for heads. These robots, which will be partly pupeteered, can sense and avoid one another, perform semi-autonomous movement, and may eventually have their own voices. Within the opera’s narrative framework, they function as a kind of Greek chorus, perpetually retelling the story of Simon Powers in a choreographed pageantry. The also serve as sculptural set pieces and, since they’re so bright, as stage lights.

Stage Robot for Death and The Powers (Credit: Opera of the Future)

Another example of music and technology working in harmony is a giant stringed instrument called The Chandelier, which can be stimulated by both a human player and by electromagnets, allowing for a much greater range of notes than a standard string instrument. The Chandelier provides the opportunity for a powerful duet between Powers and his wife, after his physical death – another form of disembodied communication.

The Chandelier (Credit: Opera of the Future)

After the 2010 premiere in Monaco, a US and World tour is planned. I for one can’t wait to see how it turns out.

I had this thought to pursue (well, extend) a project to Los Angeles, which led me to discover The Magic Poetry Bus & Get Lit, a non-profit organization that encourages and supports the love for literature among children. Get Lit is also involved in presenting literature through public performances. So, The Magic Poetry Bus was created to bring poetry/writing to public elementary and secondary schools, as well as to juvenile halls. It’s going to travel all throughout California, and onboard will be poets, actors, playwrights and a film crew. The artists will teach classes/workshops, writing exercises.. Th bus reminds me of the Festival Express (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_Express), a train that toured all over Canada back in the 70s with the biggest names in rock then like Janis Joplin, the Greatful Dead who performed at festivals at every stop. But, I do have a slight “groan” on the topic: The Magic Poetry bus is a thoughtful idea for kids and i’m for anything that benefits the community, but what about for the people in my age group & older (21+)? Is there a bus for us, too?

*If you know of any other current projects in the city, please forward the info to poetry.poetrylosangeles@gmail.com

I’ve been hanging out with so many poets (most of whom I was too timid to talk to) this month that it’s almost like I am one of them.

The week before I left for Portland, I attended three readings as part of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. They featured Louise Glück, Carolyn Forché and Robert Pinsky. Since the readings were more than two weeks ago, my report is hardly breaking news (this is my first chance to write about them). However, I enjoyed them so much that I still want to share my impressions.

July 9 / Louise Glück read poems from A Village Life, a collection that releases September 1. I was so mesmerized by the poems and her reading of them I took no notes (read part 1 of this series to learn how this is different from my normal behavior). She introduced them very simply: with a confession that she wrote the poems to try something new, an admonition to all writers to be sure writing remains an adventure and a warning that she typically reads poems straight through with no breaks and no explanations.

A couple of my fellow bloggers asked me if it was true that Glück believes in unemotional readings. I don’t know what she believes (and she didn’t say), and I had to think for a bit about it to see what I thought. She rarely utilized hand gestures, facial expressions, eye contact or voice inflection. I suppose that could be interpreted as unemotional. However, I was incredibly moved by the poems themselves (they are the touching and tender voices of various narrators). I believe the poems are so powerful that her intention may be to stay out of their way. The only thing I can say I noticed Glück doing by way of “performance” was to play with pacing, especially those silences that hang in the air for emphasis, those breaks that make you ache. I had an extremely emotional response to her reading — the beauty of it stunned me.

Glück was paired with novelist Caryl Phillips, who read from his new novel (not yet released in the U.S.) called In the falling snow. The haiku of Richard Wright inspired the title of the novel: “In the falling snow/ a laughing boys holds out his palms/ until they are white.” Phillips talked with great reverence about Wright and the haiku obsession which dominated the last year and a half of his life. He wrote 4,000 haiku, and before he died, he identified the 800 he liked best.

July 7 / Carolyn Forché read poems that are part of a manuscript-in-progress. Unlike Glück, Forché used hand gestures and vocal changes to give her reading a theatrical feel. She could fan out her hand while describing an object and make you believe the object was floating there in space beside the podium, make you believe she’d conjured its image — a prop, a stage — specifically for our collective examination. She varied the volume of her voice dramatically and often spoke in a partial whisper, like she was telling a ghost story whose outcome could instruct us about either our impending doom or our salvation. She felt her words intensely and seemed to barely contain their power over her. (I wrote a poem by assembling truth and lies from my time in Saratoga the evening of the reading. It is Cantina.)

Forché was paired with novelist Marilynne Robinson. The section she shared from her novel Home was one she’d never read aloud before, saying it was a difficult scene. She told us that Skidmore is always the kind of audience with which “it’s safe to do things it’s otherwise ill-advised to do.”

July 6 / Robert Pinsky read from a collaborative work-in-progress, citing “the spirit of the Writers Institute.” The piece commemorates the election of President Obama by alternating music (Negro spirituals re-imagined and composed specifically for the tribute) with Pinsky’s words. Pinsky admits how daunting a task the project is (says, “the difficulty. That’s why we do it”) and touches upon the importance of feeling vulnerable as a writer. He insists the words that play off the music are not poems, recounting for us the debate he’d had with collaborators over whether or not to print the words in the program when the piece is performed. Although he didn’t want them printed (perhaps ever), he relented, reached a compromise by calling them “lyrics” for the composer’s music instead of “poems.”

When Pinsky reads, he enunciates his words with great skill, managing to wrap his mouth around each one while still reading fairly rapidly. The task animates his entire face — his eyebrows, the furrowed space between his eyebrows, the corners of his mouth — quite delightfully and gives visual and audible rhythm to his reading. He concluded by sharing with us a poem he wrote at a prior Skidmore conference based on an assignment he’d given his students: write what can’t be written about.

Pinsky was paired with fiction writer Jim Shepard, who went first and read one hell of a short story (I apologize that I didn’t make note of the title). He said very little beforehand except for this (paraphrase): “I’m going to take shorter than my allotted time. I know this will bring the poet who reads next to tears of gratitude.” (Shepard also taught and read at Tin House.)

So monkey mind* says to me, “Big deal! So you’ve got a notebook full of ideas? Everyone has ideas. You’ll never be able to do anything with them.” And as soon as it comes out of his mouth, I think: “Gotcha!” Not long ago, monkey mind told me I couldn’t write because I didn’t have any ideas. Well, well. It’s much easier to write on those days when you’ve seen through monkey mind’s tricks.

And so today, after two weeks without a full poem, I have a first draft of something! It’s got a long title, as my poems sometimes do — “Cantina: Poetry and fiction in Saratoga the evening Carolyn Forché reads from a manuscript in progress” — and it’s posted at “i am maureen” (leave a comment here if you need the password).

Posts are forthcoming about the readings (Robert Pinsky from Monday night, Carolyn Forché last night and Louise Gluck tomorrow night).

* ** *

*Monkey mind is what Natalie Goldberg calls our inner critic, the thing that tries to keep us from writing.

Three great literary figures were born in Long Branch.  I actually had the pleasure of meeting two of them.

I met Norman Mailer in Miami in 1972.  Although I was a terrified college student, I loved his books Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago, so I gathered up my courage and approached him.  He asked me where I was from (Long Branch) and he told me he was born there.  We had a lovely chat and I was always glad I’d had the courage to speak to him.  Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York.  He died in November, 2007.  At the age of nine composed a 250-page science fiction story called “Invasion From Mars.” An ambitious and competitive student, he graduated from Brooklyn’s Boys High School in 1939 and won admission to Harvard at age 16. While still an undergraduate, he won a student fiction contest sponsored by Story magazine.

In 1967, Mailer was arrested at the Pentagon while demonstrating against the Vietnam War, an experience he recounted in his book Armies of the Night (1968), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) continued Mailer’s coverage of the political conventions. His political involvement culminated in an exuberant, if ultimately unsuccessful, campaign for Mayor of New York City in 1969.

He career languished, but at the end of the seventies, Mailer made a startling comeback with The Executioner’s Song (1979).   As he had used the techniques of the novel to inform his journalism of the 1960s, he now adopted real life undisguised as the material for a “non-fiction novel,” relating the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, whose death by firing squad in Utah was the first execution to take place in America since the 1960s. Although solidly grounded in fact, The Executioner’s Song read like a thoroughly imagined work of fiction, and was recognized as such by the Pulitzer Prize Committee. 

I never met the journalist, writer, and poet Dorothy Parker., although I’m sure I would have liked her if I had.   Born on August 22, 1893, in the West End of Long Branch, New Jersey Dorothy Parker became a legendary literary figure, known for her sarcasm and wit. She worked on such magazines as Vogue and Vanity Fair during the late 1910s. Parker went on to work as a book reviewer for The New Yorker in the 1920s. She remained a contributor to The New Yorker for many years; the magazine also published a number of her short stories. One of her most popular stories, “Big Blonde,” won the O. Henry Award in 1929.

In addition to her writing, Dorothy Parker was a noted member of the New York literary scene in 1920s. She formed a group called the Algonquin Round Table with writer Robert Benchley and playwright Robert Sherwood. This artistic crowd also included such members as The New Yorker founder Harold Ross, comedian Harpo Marx, and playwright Edna Ferber among others. The group took its name from its hangout—the Algonquin Hotel, but also also known as the Vicious Circle for the somewhat mean-spirited remarks made by its members.

An example of her dead-on wit is the quote,  “Women and elephants never forget.” 

Here is Parker at her bawdy best:

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.

I met Robert Pinsky twice and both times was impressed with his charm and graciousness.  The first time I spoke with him was at a reading he did at my alma mater and his, Rutgers University.  I told him we had much in common, since I had lived in Long Branch and had also attended Rutgers.  Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940, in Long Branch. Even as a child, Pinsky was conscious of his love for the arts. His father, Milford Simon, was an optician. Sylvia, his mother, wanted her son to become an optician, too. Instead, Robert became the first person in his family to go to college.

His translation of The Inferno of Dante  brought him fame and much acclaim.  He received both The Los Angeles Times Book Review Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for Translation in 1995. Pinsky’s masterpiece furthered his successful career in writing, and earned him his next job: Poet Laureate of the United States.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington appointed Robert Pinsky to be the ninth Poet Laureate and the country’s 39th Consultant in Poetry in 1997. The position of Poet Laureate requires recipients to complete an annual lecture on their poetry as well as introduce poets in the Library’s annual poetry series (among the oldest in the country). In addition, the Laureate is expected to raise public awareness of poetry through programs and country-wide projects. The energetic Pinsky was elated to receive the title of Poet Laureate for three consecutive terms; an amazing feat.  Here are some of my favorite books:

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. (translator) New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1994.

The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1996

Jersey Rain. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 2000.

In 1997, Pinsky started “The Favorite Poem Program.” Now compiled on an internet database, the program initially invited 100 average Americans to read their favorite poetry and have it recorded for the official archives of the Library of Congress. The program was a huge success, receiving over 18,000 submissions and attracting people from all walks of life.  He videotaped ordinary people of all ages reading their favorite poem.  You can check it out at  www.favoritepoem.org . 

So not only does Long Branch have amazing places to eat, it has produced some great literary minds, as well.  Must be all that sea air. 

[The Vermont Poetry Newsletter is not issued by me but by Ron Lewis, by whose permission I post this.]

Vermont Poetry Newsletter

Your Poetry & Spoken Word Gateway in the Green Mountain State

May 17, 2009

1. Newsletter Editor’s Note/Notes to Otter Creek Poets
2. Writing Assignments/Suggestions/Exercises/Prompts
3. Otter Creek Poets
4. Poetry At The White House
5. Robert Pinsky Video: Samurai Song
6. Robert Pack
7. Horace Beck
8. Presto Manifesto! Rhymed Poetry
9. Poetic Form: Ghazal
10. 3 Poems Selected For Pushcart Prize
11. Certificate in Literary Publishing
12. Poetry Readings Resume At The Book King
13. Great River Arts Institute Writing Programs
14. Week’s Review: Sisterhood of Homeless Women In Poetry
15. Did You Know? Sex Pest Derek Walcott Bows Out of Race
16. Ponderings – Notes On The Risqué
17. Poetry Quote (Gary Snyder)
18. US Poets Laureate List
19. Failbetter Poem
20. Linebreak Poem
21. Copper Canyon Press Poem
22. American Life in Poetry Poems (3)
23. Vermont Poets Past and Present Project
24. Vermont Poet Laureates
25. Contact Info for Publisher of VPN: Ron Lewis
26. Vermont Literary Journals
27. Poetry Society of Vermont
28. Year-Round Poetry Workshops in Vermont
29. Other Poetry Workshops in Vermont
30. Year-Round Poetry Writing Centers in Vermont
31. Poetry Event Calendar

About the Vermont Poetry Newsletter Network

The Vermont Poetry Newsletter Network is made up of people of all backgrounds, ages and skills who appreciate the craft of poetry and want to promote it in the beautiful state of Vermont. The network consists of a free e-mail list, an eventual web site, workshops, open mics, poetry performances and other literary events.  The network provides opportunities to meet local poets, talk about and enjoy poetry, and motivate and inspire yourself in whatever writing projects you are involved.

1.)

Dear Friends of Poetry:

It’s time to catch your breath from this year’s National Poetry Month.  Usually by this time, there is nothing left in the bank for poetry events, but there are still many fine programs and readings left.  If you can’t get out of the house, then by golly, write!  Or read!!  (May I recommend Edward Hirsch’s Poet’s Choice to you.)

The Otter Creek Poets will have their annual Potluck and Poetry Feast at Deanna Shapiro’s on June 4th.  12:00-1:00 Potluck, 1:00-3:00 Poetry.  Directions to Deanna’s will be in the next VPN.

I’m also looking for poets to read on Friday, May 29th, at the Book King in Rutland (starting at 6:00 p.m.).  The theme is “Spring” or “Signs of Spring.”  Readings will happen at the Book King on the last Friday of every month.

Until next time!

Ron Lewis
VPN Publisher
247-5913

2.)

THIS WEEK’S WRITING ASSIGNMENT/SUGGESTION/EXERCISE:

For God’s Sake, Let Us Sit upon the Ground – 
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed; some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives; some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d:  for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

Richard II, III.ii.155-170 (Richard)

BLANK VERSE

“ Blank verse” in English almost always means iambic pentameter, although strictly speaking it could use other meters so long as it is unrhymed. It offers considerable metric variety within the 5-foot, usually 10-syllable line. An extra syllable or two sometimes sneaks in, especially an unstressed (“feminine”) syllable at the end of a line.

Assignment: Read 200 lines of blank verse out loud. Repeat until you have the cadence firmly in your ear. Then write 20 lines of it.

• Hint: Use Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” a Shakespeare monologue.

Don’t slip into Elizabethan language. Write like yourself.

If you don’t want to stop after 20 lines, keep going.

LAST WEEK’S WRITING ASSIGNMENT/SUGGESTION/EXERCISE:

Writing is, and always will be, an art practiced in solitude.  So why would you want to write in a room full of other people?

My aim is to give you a change of scene, a safe place to try new directions, and a fun time.  This special writing marathon workshop, part of the Otter Creek Poets’ celebration of National Poetry Month, is a chance to write, write, and write some more.

No just for poets . . . work in any genre or style you choose.  There will be chances to share what you write, but that is 100% optional; feel free to keep work private.

Bring pen and paper, a bag lunch, and whatever else you will need to be comfortable for 3-1/2 hours.  Laptop computers are permitted, but bring your own extension cord.  You should also know that the library’s wireless signal does not penetrate into the meeting room.

No preparation is required.  However, if your writing life hasn’t been going your way – if you are stuck, blocked, frustrated, obsessed, or otherwise dissatisfied with your work – gather your thoughts about that difficulty in advance and I will try to address them in the group setting or privately.

The afternoon of writing went a bit differently than what was identified above.  Here is what actually took place:

National Poetry Month Writing Marathon

Ground Rules

1) NO CRITIQUES:  The purpose of this session is to generate new writing in first draft form.  We will not be critiquing, editing, or perfecting any work that is shared.

2) CONFIDENTIALITY:  In order for members to be able to write freely, please remember to treat what you hear confidentially.  What happens here, stays here.

3) TACT:  Assume that all writings shared here is imaginative, and that the characters and speakers in poems and stories are fictional.  Do this even when the writing is obviously autobiographical.

4) USING THE TIME FAIRLY:  Give everyone a chance to share and speak.

12:00 – 12:30  Introductions
Who we are and why we write

Write down brief answers to these questions.  At your turn to introduce yourself, read what you have written.

1) Who are you, where are you from, and what do you do in the world?
2) As a writer, what is your particular gift?
3) What is the hardest thing for you to write about?

12:30 – 1:00  Loosening up.
The Writer’s Body

Like it or not, we are beings who live inside bodies.  All of our consciousness, memories, and experience are stored in the body.  Get comfortable – sit, stand, move, whatever feels right.  Close your eyes and notice your body, from the inside.  Now ask your body, one part at a time, to tell you some stories.  Write down the stories.

1:00 – 1:30  Secrets and Lies

Our writing emerges over the course of a lifetime.  Some things emerge early, some later.  Today, try writing something you’ve been putting off.  Maybe something you didn’t have the skill to attempt until now.  Maybe something you weren’t free to say until recently.  Write it now.

2:00 – 2:30  Your Best Story

There is a story everybody makes you tell over and over again.  It’s the story you tell so well.  Oddly enough, you have never written it down.  Do that now.

2:30 – 3:00  Questions & Answers
3:00 – 3:30  Sharing Our Writing

Good Luck!

(All Assignments are products of David Weinstock unless otherwise indicated.)

3.)

Otter Creek Poetry Society celebrates National Poetry Month with Writing Marathon

David Weinstock is not afraid to ask people tough questions, if poetry is what comes out of it.

On April 23, more than 20 community members gathered in the basement conference room of the Ilsley Public Library, as they do every Thursday, for the Otter Creek Poetry Society meeting. This Thursday, the group celebrated poetry month by holding a 3 1/2 hour writing workshop that Weinstock, the founder of the group, called the National Poetry Month Writing Marathon.

Over the course of the afternoon, the group – which ranged in age from nine to 89 – wrote prose and poetry to answer prompts proposed by Weinstock, such as “Who are you and what do you do in the world?” and “Write a story that you tell so well but have never written down….

4.)

POETRY AT THE WHITE HOUSE ! (FINALLY)
Poetry, Music and Spoken Word

Last Tuesday, the President and the First Lady hosted an evening celebrating poetry, music and the spoken word. This event was designed around the theme of dialogue, showing how dialogue is important in every aspect of who we are as Americans and as human beings, and demonstrating how communication is a constant throughout the ages.  The hope was also that the evening’s gathering helped ensure that all voices are heard, particularly voices that are often not heard. We are fortunate to have a wide variety of upcoming and legendary performers such as Joshua Bennett, actor James Earl Jones, Eric Lewis, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, novelist Michael Chabon, Mayda Del Valle and Esperanza Spalding.
They invited students from American, Gallaudet, Georgetown, and Howard Universities to participate in the event.

“I have wanted to do this from Day One, the notion of standing in this room and hearing some poetry,” said Mrs. Obama. It’s no secret that President Obama is a fan of poetry. He was spotted reading some shortly after winning the election and included a poet at his inaugration ceremony.

The “poetry jam” was streamed live on the White House Web site and was broadcast on HBO. Here’s Joshua Bennett performing his work at the White House.

5.)

Listen to Robert Pinsky read “Samurai Song”

6.)

Robert Pack, Poet, Essayist, Former Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

Robert Pack is in Missoula, teaching at the University of Montana and completing a critical study of Robert Frost.

Pounding It Out, his latest verse collection, was published by the University of Chicago Press.

7.)

HORACE BECK

• I could find nothing to prove the rumor of the beef Robert Pack had with Horace Beck for making racial jokes, leading to Pack leading a revolt at Middlebury College, and then leaving altogether.  Here’s something, though, that I did find out about Horace:

horace p. beck passed away at his home on tuesday, july 1st, 2003. he was 82.

horace beck was the man behind the narration of the legend of harry meyers on medicine stone’s gauge. beck was a traditional storyteller and a master of folklore who began sailing at age three. he made 28 transatlantic crossings and was the first white man allowed on the whaling ships in the west indies and in tonga in the south pacific. he spoke five languages, wrote a dozen books, and was one of the most popular professors ever to teach at middlebury college. in his youth he wrestled for ten years and had his ear torn half off, but was never pinned. he lived in his mountain home in ripton, vermont, and was a regular presence on national public radio…

8.)

Presto Manifesto!

Seventh in a series of eight manifestos.
BY A.E. STALLINGS

The freedom to not-rhyme must include the freedom to rhyme. Then verse will be “free.”

All rhymed poetry must be rhyme-driven. This is no longer to be considered pejorative.

Rhyme is at the wheel. No, rhyme is the engine….

9.)

Poetic Form: Ghazal

The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets–and typically no more than fifteen–that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.

Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Indian, and Pakistani musicians. The form has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumi and Hafiz. In the eighteenth-century, the ghazal was used by poets writing in Urdu, a mix of the medieval languages of Northern India, including Persian. Among these poets, Ghalib is the recognized master….

10.)

Three Poems from Poetry Selected for The Pushcart Prize

CHICAGO – Poetry magazine is pleased to announce that three poems featured recently in its pages have been selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses (2010 edition): David Yezzi’s “The Good News” (June 2007), Louise Glück’s “Midsummer” (February 2008), and Geoffrey Brock’s “Daddy: 1933″ (June 2008).

11.)

Certificate in Literary Publishing

[Extract] Have you been thinking or dreaming about starting your own literary magazine, or founding a press to publish books? Do you have a vision of what works you would like to bring to life? Or would you like to work for a literary magazine or small press? The Department of Professional Studies and Special Programs at Emerson College offers the Literary Publishing Program, which is open to poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and individuals who would like to learn the publishing skills needed to start and run their own literary magazines or their own book publishing ventures, or work for a larger literary publishing enterprise.
 
The program in Literary Publishing is held as a two-week intensive during Emerson College’s May intersession (5/11-5/22). Outside of classroom instruction, participants will work on a business plan on their press or magazine. Participants who complete the intensive and submit a rough business plan for their literary magazine or press will earn the Literary Publishing Certificate. This program is non-credit.
 
This non-credit program provides five two-day modules and a half-day panel designed to give the basics in starting and running a literary magazine or small press, giving those enrolled a way to avoid common, and costly, mistakes…

Click Here for Details

12.)

Poetry Readings Resume at The Book King, Center Street, Rutland

The Book King is returning to having public poetry readings, to be held on the last Friday of each month, the first of which would be May 29th, at 6:00-7:00 p.m.  I will be organizing the readers, develop the flyers, and do the promotion of the events through the local newspapers and radio stations.  There will be flyers at the Book King in order to have available for handouts.

I am hoping to have several poets lined up for this inaugural reading.  Please contact me if you’d like to read at what should be a grand kick off.  For this reading, I am looking for poems containing the idea of “Spring” or “Signs of Spring” for a common theme.

For future readings, I am thinking along the lines of having readers from:

1) The Killington Arts Guild and their writers from the publication “A Gathering of Poets”
2) Members of the Otter Creek Poets, who have published 4 anthologies
3) Readers from the Vermont Young Writers Project
4) Youthful “Slam Poets”
5) Anti-war poets

13.)

Great River Arts Institute 2009 Courses

14.)

THIS WEEK’S REVIEW

BELOVED COMMUNITY: THE SISTERHOOD OF HOMELESS WOMEN IN POETRY

edited by WHEEL
Posted by Megan under E-Reviews
Review by Anne McDuffie
[Extract] In this anthology, WHEEL—the Women’s Housing, Equality and Enhancement League— has assembled an impressive array of poems, culled from the chapbooks they publish annually. WHEEL is, by its own definition, a “scrappy little grassroots organizing effort of homeless and formerly homeless women in Seattle, Washington.” Some of the writers included in this collection have come through the classes WHEEL sponsors at day centers and through their StreetWrites program; some are workshop organizers and staff writers for Real Change, Seattle’s homeless newspaper. Their poems bring us the news from the “invisible side of the street,” as Anitra Freeman describes it in “In Memoriam,” a prose tribute to the members of WHEEL, and to all homeless women, who have died outside or by violence in King County.

There are gems here, some of them rough-edged and some of them flawed—but taken together, they dazzle. The strength of the collection is in its variety. Beloved Community allows us to know the women of WHEEL as individuals linked by circumstance rather than as “the homeless.” These poems are deeply personal and speak with exhilarating directness, delighting in strong rhythms, bold images and flashes of humor….

15.)

Did You Know?

“Sex pest file gives Oxford poetry race a nasty edge”

The race to win poetry’s most prestigious academic post has turned dirty after Oxford academics were anonymously sent a lurid dossier accusing Derek Walcott, the frontrunner and Nobel laureate, of being a sex pest.

The package was circulated last week to staff and graduates eligible to vote in next Saturday’s election for the Oxford professorship of poetry, as well as to the offices of Cherwell, a student newspaper.

The dossier recounts a sexual harassment claim against Walcott, 79, when he taught at Harvard in the 1980s.

The poet was reprimanded following the allegation that he tried to pressure a female student into sleeping with him.

Another harassment claim against Walcott dating from 1996 has also reemerged, sparking a heated debate at Oxford.

Walcott’s main challenger for the professorship is Ruth Padel, a poet and travel writer, who is seeking to become the first woman to hold the post in its 300-year history…

FOLLOW-UP:

“Smears drive Walcott from Oxford poetry professor race”

[Extract] Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott has withdrawn from the race to become Oxford’s professor of poetry following an anonymous letter campaign.

The campaign saw up to 100 Oxford academics sent photocopied pages from a book detailing a sexual harassment claim made against Walcott by a Harvard student in 1982. The student alleged that Walcott asked her to, “Imagine me making love to you. What would I do? … Would you make love with me if I asked you?”, and claimed that after she turned him down, she was given a C grade in his class.

Walcott was one of three candidates in the running for the position – the most influential in poetry in the UK behind that of the laureateship – alongside Ruth Padel and the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. He was backed by major names in the literary world, including Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst, Graham Robb, Marina Warner, poet Jenny Joseph, and professor Hermione Lee, and was seen as the frontrunner for the post. Oxford graduates are due to vote for their choice of poetry professor on 16 May.

But the Nobel laureate said today that he was withdrawing from the election, hitting out at the “low tactics”, and the “low and degrading attempt at character assassination” it had become….

16.)

“Ponderings”

Notes on the Risqué
by Jerry Garcia

On the discount table at one of those chain bookstores that I really should boycott, I found a collection of cartoons that had been rejected by the New Yorker. Titled The Rejected Collection – Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See in the New Yorker, this book was full of “risqué, silly and weird cartoons.” Since the first cartoon made me chuckle and the book was heavily discounted, I bought it. In this book, along with a collection of clunkers, were some funny cartoons that were written and/or drawn in bad taste.

This editorial is not a book review. The book has inspired some conflicting thoughts I have about good taste and spoken word. As a middle-aged man ensconced in the pop culture and entertainment trends of my lifetime, I often enjoy the risqué and the prurient…

17.)

How Poetry Comes To Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Poetry Quote by Gary Snyder

18.)

Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.

• A Net-annotated list of all the poets who have served the Library of Congress as Consultant (the old title) or Poet Laureate Consultant (the new title). Biographies & general reference sites are linked to the poets’ names — for the recent Laureates these are our own poet profiles with book-buying links at the bottom. Many of the other linked biographies are pages from the Academy of American Poets’ Find a Poet archive, a growing & invaluable resource. If there is no general information site about the poet, we have searched the Net for sample poems or other writings or recordings & listed those below the poet’s name.

Joseph Auslander 1937-41
Allen Tate 1943-44
Robert Penn Warren 1944-45
Louise Bogan 1945-46
Karl Shapiro 1946-47
Robert Lowell 1947-48
Leonie Adams 1948-49
Elizabeth Bishop 1949-50
Conrad Aiken 1950-52 (First to serve two terms)
William Carlos WilliamsAppointed to serve two terms in 1952 but did not serve — for more on this & other Laureate controversies see the history in Jacket magazine.
Randall Jarrell 1957-58
Robert Frost 1958-59
Richard Eberhart 1959-61
Louis Untermeyer 1961-63
Howard Nemerov 1963-64
Reed Whittemore 1964-65
Stephen Spender 1965-66
James Dickey 1966-68
William Jay Smith 1968-70
William Stafford 1970-71
Josephine Jacobsen 1971-73
Daniel Hoffman 1973-74
Stanley Kunitz 1974-76
Robert Hayden 1976-78
William Meredith 1978-80
Maxine Kumin 1981-82
Anthony Hecht 1982-84
Robert Fitzgerald 1984-85 Appointed and served in a health-limited capacity, but did not come to the Library of Congress
Reed Whittemore 1984-85 Interim Consultant in Poetry
Gwendolyn Brooks 1985-86
Robert Penn Warren 1986-87 First to be designated Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
Richard Wilbur 1987-88
Howard Nemerov 1988-90
Mark Strand 1990-91
Joseph Brodsky 1991-92
Mona Van Duyn 1992-93
Rita Dove 1993-95
Robert Hass 1995-97
Robert Pinsky 1997-2000
Stanley Kunitz 2000-2001
Billy Collins 2001-2003
Louise Glück 2003-2004
Ted Kooser 2004-2006
Donald Hall 2006-2007
Charles Simic 2007-2008
Kay Ryan 2008-Present

19.)

Failbetter.com – Lorca in Eden

20.)

Linebreak is an online journal with a bias for good poetry. Here is a poem from their web site this week:

Somewhere South of Miles City
By Joe Wilkins

Stop the car. There. Now
breathe with me. That broken

Ford needs only a swift kick
to set it right. Listen. The radio

man says For Sale, says Believe.
You believed in me. I believed… [Extract]

21.)

Here’s a poem from Copper Canyon Press, in its “Reading Room”.

An Introduction to the Mechanics of Deformable Bodies: Christ Martin

When Erica says
I am feeling myself and jovial
I think of the orange

Tipped trees between
The buildings out
My window, their penknife

Leaves grazing like air-bound anemones
Haunted by the jellyfish
Forms of black plastic bags, today… [Extract]

22.)

American Life in Poetry: Column 214

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Sometimes I wonder at my wife’s forbearance. She’s heard me tell the same stories dozens of times, and she still politely laughs when she should. Here’s a poem by Susan Browne, of California, that treats an oft-told story with great tenderness.

On Our Eleventh Anniversary

You’re telling that story again about your childhood,
when you were five years old and rode your blue bicycle

from Copenhagen to Espergaerde, and it was night
and snowing by the time you arrived,

and your grandparents were so relieved to see you,
because all day no one knew where you were… [Extract]

American Life in Poetry: Column 215

To commemorate Mother’s Day, here’s a lovely poem by David Wojahn of Virginia, remembering his mother after forty years.

Walking to School, 1964

Blurring the window, the snowflakes’ numb white lanterns.
She’s brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne
And sets her lipstick upright on the sink.
The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip,

The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder.
Then she’s dressed–the pillbox hat and ersatz fur,
And I’m dressed too, mummified in stocking cap
And scarves, and I walk her to the bus stop… [ Extract]

American Life in Poetry: Column 216

Judy Loest lives in Knoxville and, like many fine Appalachian writers, her poems have a welcoming conversational style, rooted in that region’s storytelling tradition. How gracefully she sweeps us into the landscape and the scene!

Faith

Leaves drift from the cemetery oaks onto late grass,
Sun-singed, smelling like straw, the insides of old barns.
The stone angel’s prayer is uninterrupted by the sleeping
Vagrant at her feet, the lone squirrel, furtive amid the litter.

Someone once said my great-grandmother, on the day she died,
rose from her bed where she had lain, paralyzed and mute
For two years following a stroke, and dressed herself–the good
Sunday dress of black crepe, cotton stockings, sensible, lace-up shoes… [Extract]

23.)

KEEP PAST VERMONT POETS ALIVE!  I’M SOLICITING YOUR HELP:
POETS OF VERMONT PAST AND PRESENT PROJECT

I’m looking for a copy of:

1) The Literature of Vermont: A Sampler – FOUND!
2) Poets and Poetry of Vermont, by Abby Maria Hemenway, 1858
3) “Driftwood,” a poetry magazine begun in 1926 by Walter John Coates

If you have any books of poetry, chapbooks, or just poems written by Vermont poets, dating 1980 and earlier, famous or not, I’d like to know about them.  I’m beginning a project that deals strictly with Vermont poets, from Vermont’s past, with summaries of the poets themselves, a portrait photo or drawing of the poet, along with a small sampling of poems.  If you think you can help, you probably can!  Please contact me by replying to this newsletter.

Ronald Lewis

24.)

VERMONT POET LAUREATES

1) Robert Frost – 1961
2) Galway Kinnell
3) Louis Glück
4) Ellen Bryant Voigt
5) Grace Paley
6) Ruth Stone

25.)

If you ever have a need to contact me, here’s how to go about doing so:

Ronald Lewis:
Phone: 802-247-5913
Cell: 802-779-5913

Home: 1211 Forest Dale Road, Brandon, VT 05733
Email: vtpoet@gmail.com

26.)

VERMONT LITERARY JOURNALS

1) The Queen City Review

Burlington College’s  The Queen City Review is a yearly journal of art and literature and accepts the work of new and established writers and artists in the areas of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, photography, and fine art, as well as essays and criticism on all aspects of the aforementioned. They seek to publish high quality work that ranges broadly in topic and genre.

The Queen City Review can be purchased by 2-year subscription or individually.  The price of one issue is $8 plus shipping charges ($1) for a total of $9.  Subscriptions can be purchased for #$14 plus shipping charges $2) and includes the Fall 2008 and upcoming 2009 issues.  They accept cash, check, and credit cards.  You can mail your payment to them or by calling (802) 862-9616 ext. 234 to place your order over the phone.  If mailing your payment, mail details to:

ATTN: Heidi Berkowitz
Burlington College
95 North Avenue
Burlington, VT  05401

2) Bloodroot

Bloodroot is a nonprofit literary magazine dedicated to publishing diverse voices through the adventure of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction.  Their aim is to provide a platform for the free-spirited emerging and established writer.

The price of a single issue is $8.

Editor, “Do” Roberts
Bloodroot Literary Magazine
PO Box 322
Thetford Center, VT  05075
(802) 785-4916
email: bloodroot@wildblue.net

3) New England Review

A publication of Middlebury College, a high quality literary magazine that continues to uphold its reputation for publishing extraordinary, enduring work.  NER has been publishing now for over 30 years.

Cost: $8 for a single issue
$30 for a single year (4 issues)
$50 for two years (8 issues)

New England Review
Attn: Orders
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753

NEReview@middlebury.edu
(800) 450-9571

4) Willard & Maple

A Literary and Fine Art Magazine of Champlain College, Burlington.

Willard & Maple
163 South Willard Street
Freeman 302, Box 34
Burlington, VT  05401

email: willardandmaple@champlain.edu

5) Burlington Poetry Journal

The Burlington Poetry Journal is a new nonprofit publication interested in creating a means for provoking opinions, ideas, and thoughtful responses for poets in the Greater Burlington area. While there are numerous outlets for writers to gather and share privately in Vermont, there is no publication that brings together poetry of all styles and writers of all ages for the enjoyment of the general public. It is our hope that this journal will inspire writers to share their work with others who may be unaware of their talent, and for those who have never considered themselves writers to try their hand at poetry. We invite you to submit your work and share with others your thoughts and abilities with the Burlington community. The work you share will produce a dialogue as writers become aware of each other and begin to expose themselves and others to new poetry. The eclectic nature of the Burlington Poetry Journal will serve to stimulate its readers and authors.

27.)

STATE POETRY SOCIETY
Poetry Society of Vermont

The Poetry Society of Vermont, founded in 1947, is an association of poets and supporters who join in promoting an interest in poetry through meetings, workshops, readings, contests, and contributions to the society’s chapbook. Anyone may join the society including high school and college students and non-residents of Vermont. We welcome both writers and appreciative readers.

In September 2007, The Poetry Society of Vermont will celebrated its 60th Anniversary.

Membership in PSOV

Benefits:

• 2 luncheon/ workshops a year where a professional poet critiques your poems

• one hands- on writing workshop and reading under the direction of a professional poet

• the opportunity to enter contests judged by professional poets and to win awards

• fellowship with appreciative readers and writers of poetry

• opportunity for publication in the PSOV chapbook, The Mountain Troubadour

How to join:

• mail dues of $20.00 to Membership Chairman, P.O. Box 1215, Waitsfield, VT 05673

• include your name, mailing address, telephone, and e-mail address for Membership List

• memberships are renewed by January 1 of each year

The PSOV has 2 current books available for sale:

1) The Mountain Troubadour – 2008 – Curl up with 44 pages of interesting, award-winning poetry from a wonderful group of poets.  This book is only $8 (+$1 to mail).  To get yourself a copy, call or write to Betty Gaechter, 134 Hitzel Terrace, Rutland, VT 05701, 773-8679.  This little booklet may be just the thing to get you involved with the PSOV for a lifetime of friendships.

2) Brighten the Barn – 60th Anniversary Anthology – 1947-2007 – An Anthology of Poems by Members of the Poetry Society of Vermont.  99 pages of quality poetry; that’s a lot of beautiful poetry for only $12.  If you get it through me (Ron Lewis), it’s only $12.  If you want it shipped to you, the PSOV wants an extra amount to cover tax and shipping ($0.72 + $3.00).  This book retails for $15, but a reduced price is now in play to unload the few remaining copies.

28.)

YEAR-ROUND POETRY WORKSHOPS IN VERMONT

BELLOWS FALLS

1) Great River Arts Institute – See details elsewhere in this newsletter

2) Poetry Workshop at Village Square Booksellers with Jim Fowler (no relation to owner Pat).  The goal of this course is to introduce more people to the art of writing poetry and will include a discussion of modern poetry in various forms and styles. Each week, the course will provide time to share and discuss participant’s poetry. Poetry Workshops on Monday mornings (9:30-12:30 I believe)- Jim Fowler’s sessions continue, with periodic break for a few weeks between sessions.  Students should bring a poem and copies to the first class. The course will be limited to 5 to 8 students to allow adequate time to go through everyone’s poetry contributions and will meet in the cafe at Village Square Booksellers. James Fowler, of Charlestown, New Hampshire, has a Masters Degree in Environmental Science with a major in Nature Writing. He was the editor of Heartbeat of New England, a poetry anthology. Fowler has been widely published since 1998 in such journals as Connecticut Review, Quarterly of Light Verse, and Larcom Review. Fowler is a founding member of the River Voices Writer’s Circle, and a regular reader at Village Square Booksellers-River Voices Poetry Readings. The fee for this 6 week Workshop is $100, payable to Mr. Fowler at the first class. Pre-registration for the Poetry Workshop is suggested and may be made by calling Village Square Booksellers at 802-463-9404 or by email at vsbooks@sover.net or  jfowler177@comcast.net.

BERLIN

The Wayside Poets, who share their poetry publicly from time to time, have been meeting irregularly for the past 25 years.  They used to be called The Academy Street Poets.  Membership is by invitation only.  They meet now at the Wayside Restaurant & Bakery in Berlin.  Members include Diane Swan, Sherry Olson, Carol Henrikson and Sarah Hooker.  You can contact them through Sherry Olson at: solsonvt@aol.com or 454-8026.

GUILFORD

The Guilford Poets Guild, formed in 1998, meets twice a month to critique and support each other’s work.  Their series of sponsored readings by well-known poets which began at the Dudley Farm, continues now at the Women and Family Life Center.

MIDDLEBURY

The Otter Creek Poets offer a poetry workshop every Thursday afternoon, from 1:00 to 3:00 in the basement meeting room of the Ilsley Public Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury.  This workshop, the largest and oldest of its kind in the state, has been meeting weekly for 13 years.  Poets of all ages and styles come for peer feedback, encouragement, and optional weekly assignments to get the poetry flowing.  Bring a poem or two to share (plus 20 copies).  The workshops are led by David Weinstock.  There is considerable parking available behind the library, or further down the hill below that parking lot.  For more information, call David at 388-6939 or Ron Lewis at 247-5913.

NORWICH

This group meets on the first Sunday of every month at the Norwich Library, 6:30 p.m.

STOWE

There is another poetry workshop happening in Stowe, but unfortunately I know nothing much about this group.  If you do, contact me!

WAITSFIELD

The Mad River Poets consists of a handful of poets from the Route 100 corridor.  More on this group in the future.

29.)

OTHER POETRY WORKSHOPS IN VERMONT

BURLINGTON

Scribes in the making put pen to paper as part of an open verse-writing session at the Fletcher Free Library, 235 College Street.  Three consecutive Thursdays, starting January 8, 2009, 5:00-6:00 p.m.  Free.  Contact information: 862-1094.

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION

The Writer’s Center
58 Main Street, White River Junction, Vermont

Instructor: April Ossmann (author of Anxious Music, Four Way Books, 2007, writing, editing and publishing consultant, and former Executive Director of Alice James Books)

Info: (802)333-9597 or aprilossmann@hotmail.com and www.aprilossmann.com

• Note: If you know of any others, or have personal information about the workshop in Stowe and Guilford, please send me that information.  I realize that there are several smaller groups or workshops around the state.  However, because of their intimacy, they are not posted above, allowing them to offer “memberships” to close friends or acquaintances that they feel would be most appropriate.

30.)

YEAR-ROUND POETRY WRITING CENTERS IN VERMONT

SPRINGFIELD

A Writer’s Group has started to meet at the Springfield Town Library on the fourth Monday of each month, from 7 to 8 pm.  For more information, call 885-3108.

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION

The Writer’s Center is for serious writers and nervous beginners. It’s for procrastinators who could benefit from regular deadlines – and for the prolific who could benefit from quality feedback. It’s for anyone with a manuscript hidden in a drawer, or a life story or poem waiting to be written. It’s for people who don’t know where to start or how to end. And for writers who are doing just fine on their own, but would like the company of other writers.  The Writer’s Center is for anyone who is writing or wants to write.  One of the Center’s consultants is April Ossman (www.aprilossmann.com).  Founded by Joni B. Cole and Sarah Stewart Taylor, the Writer’s Center offers instruction and inspiration through a selection of workshops, discussions, and community. We would love to see you – and your writing – at The Writer’s Center!

UNDERHILL

Women Writing for (a) Change supports the authentic experience of women who honor themselves through creative writing.  Our community supports reflection as we move into our questions and awaken to change.  Participants enhance expressive skills, strengthen their voices, deepen themselves as women as writers for positive change in all spheres of life.  Creative writing in all genres is our shared vehicle.  Women Writing for (a) Change is for women who, 1) dream of writing for self-discovery, for personal or social healing, 2) hunger for creative process in their lives, 3) yearn to explore their feminine voice, 4) crave reflective, space, and 5) are in transition.  For more information, go to their web site at www.womenwritingVT.com/ or contact Sarah Bartlett at either 899-3772 or sarah@womenwritingvt.com.

31.)

POETRY EVENT CALENDAR

Below please find the most current list of poetry happenings in Vermont for the near future.  Please be aware that these events can be found on Poetz.com, but there is usually additional information that is typed here that would be cumbersome to place on Poetz.com.  Please note all events are Vermont-based unless they are of extreme importance or happen to lie just outside our borders.  If you would like to save on paper and ink, please just highlight what you need, or perhaps only events for the coming month, and print that information.

Thu, May 21: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Wed, May 27: Monkey House, 30 Main Street, Winooski, 8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.  Poetry Reading.  A new place for poets to read and hear new work.  This is a continuing series happening on alternate Wednesdays.

Thu, May 28: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, May 28: Parima, 185 Pearl Street, Burlington, 8:45 p.m. -10:00 p.m.  Poetry Jam.  This is a continuing series, happening on alternate Thursdays.

Fri, May 29: The Book King, Center Street, Rutland, 6:00 p.m.  Poetry Reading.  Inaugural reading at their new location, under new ownership.  Theme will be “Spring” or “Signs of Spring.”  Contact Ron Lewis in order to sign up to read.  vtpoet@gmail.com, or 247-5913.

Mon, Jun 1: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Eamon Grennan to read.  Eamon Grennan was born in Dublin in 1941 and educated at UCD, where he studied English and Italian, and Harvard, where he received his PhD in English. His volumes of poetry include What Light There Is & Other Poems, (North Point Press, 1989), Wildly for Days (1983), What Light There Is (1987), As If It Matters (1991), So It Goes (1995), Selected and New Poems (2000) and Still Life with Waterfall (2001). His latest collection, The Quick of It, appeared in 2004 in Ireland, and in Spring 2005 in America. His books of poetry are published in the United States by Graywolf Press, and in Ireland by Gallery Press. Other publications include Leopardi: Selected Poems (Princeton 1997), and Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century, a collection of essays on modern Irish poetry. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in many magazines both in Ireland and the US.  Grennan has given lectures and workshops in colleges and universities in the US, including courses for the graduate programs in Columbia and NYU. During 2002 he was the Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University. His grants and prizes in the United States include awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Leopardi: Selected Poems received the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Still Life with Waterfall was the recipient of the 2003 Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Poets. His poems have been awarded a number of Pushcart prizes. Grennan has taught since 1974 at Vassar College where he is the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English.

Thu, Jun 4: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jun 4: Howe Library, Mayer Room, Hanover, NH, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.  Author Reading & Book Signing: April Ossmann.  April reads from Anxious Music.  For info, (603) 643-4120, Ellen.Lynch@TheHowe.org.

Wed, Jun 10: Vermont Humanities Council, 11 Loomis Street, Montpelier, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.  Robert Frost’s poetry is known, among other things, for its ability to evoke the seasons of New England in all their complexity. Join Peter Gilbert, the Vermont Humanities Council’s executive director and the executor of Frost’s estate, in reading and discussing some of Frost’s spring poems. Participants are invited to either read the poems in advance or upon arriving. Refreshments served. RSVPs are encouraged at 802.262.2626 x307. Walk-ins welcome.

Wed, Jun 10: Monkey House, 30 Main Street, Winooski, 8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.  Poetry Reading.  A new place for poets to read and hear new work.  This is a continuing series happening on alternate Wednesdays.

Thu, Jun 11: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jun 11: Parima, 185 Pearl Street, Burlington, 8:45 p.m. -10:00 p.m.  Poetry Jam.  This is a continuing series, happening on alternate Thursdays.

Sat, Jun 13: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

Thu, Jun 18: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Sat, Jun 20: 7:00, Ball and Chain Cafe at the Briggs Carriage Bookstore, 16 Park St., Brandon, 7:00 p.m.  Poetry/Music Performance.  David Cavanagh reads poems from his new book, Falling Body (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), interspersed, entangled with and accompanied by the music of Blackbird (Bob DeMarco and Rachel Clark).

Wed, Jun 24: Monkey House, 30 Main Street, Winooski, 8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.  Poetry Reading.  A new place for poets to read and hear new work.  This is a continuing series happening on alternate Wednesdays.

Thu, Jun 25: Parima, 185 Pearl Street, Burlington, 8:45 p.m. -10:00 p.m.  Poetry Jam.  This is a continuing series, happening on alternate Thursdays.

Thu, Jun 25: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jul 2: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jul 9: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jul 9: Parima, 185 Pearl Street, Burlington, 8:45 p.m. -10:00 p.m.  Poetry Jam.  This is a continuing series, happening on alternate Thursdays.

Thu, Jul 9: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Michael Ryan to read.  Michael Ryan has published three collections of poetry, including In Winter, Threats Instead of Trees, has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and God Hunger, as well as A Difficult Grace: On Poets, Poetry, and Writing, and the memoir Secret Life. His work has appeared in Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, New Republic, and elsewhere. Ryan has been honored by the Lenore Marshall Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and a Guggenheim. Ryan is Professor of English and Creative Writing at UC, Irvine.

Sat, Jul 11: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

Thu, Jul 16: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jul 23: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Thu, Jul 23: Parima, 185 Pearl Street, Burlington, 8:45 p.m. -10:00 p.m.  Poetry Jam.  This is a continuing series, happening on alternate Thursdays.

Mon, Jul 27: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Doreen Gilroy to read.  Doreen Gilroy’s first book, The Little Field of Self  (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares.  Her second book, Human Love, was published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2005.  Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Slate, TriQuarterly and many other magazines.

Thu, Jul 30: Ilsley Library, 75 Main Street, Middlebury, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Otter Creek Poets.  The best-known poetry critique workshop in the state.  Operating weekly for the past 12 years under the directorship of David Weinstock.

Sat, Aug 8: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

Mon, Aug 17: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Cole Swensen to read.  Cole Swensen is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She is the author of five collections of poems, including Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), winner of the 1998 Poetry Prize; Noon (Sun and Moon Press, 1997), which won a New American Writing Award; and Numen (Burning Deck Press, 1995) which was nominated for the PEN West Award in Poetry. Her translations include Art Poetic’ by Olivier Cadiot (Sun & Moon Press, Green Integer Series, 1999) and Natural Gaits by Pierre Alferi (Sun & Moon, 1995). She splits her time among Denver, San Francisco and Paris.

Thu, Sep 3: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Marge Piercy to read.  Marge Piercy has published 17 books of poetry, including What Are Big Girls Made Of, Colors Passing Through Us, and most recently her 17th volume, The Crooked Inheiritance, all from Knopf. She has written 17 novels, most recently SEX WARS in Perennial paperback now.  Her memoir Sleeping With Cats is also in Harper Collins Perennial.  Last spring, Schocken published Pesach for the Rest of Us.  Her work has been translated into 16 languages. Her CD Louder We Can’t Hear You Yet contains her political and feminist poems. She has been an editor of Leapfrog Press for the last ten years and also poetry editor of Lilith.

Sat, Sep 12: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

Thu, Oct 1: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Pattiann Rogers to read.  Pattiann Rogers has published ten books of poetry, a book-length essay, The Dream of the Marsh Wren, and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with the artist Joellyn Duesberry. Her 11th  book of poetry, Wayfare, will appear from Penguin in April, 2008.   Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2005 Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation, and five Pushcart Prizes.  In the spring of 2000 she was in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.  Her papers are archived in the Sowell Family Collection of Literature, Community and the Natural World at Texas Tech University.  She has taught as a visiting professor at various universities, including the Universities of Texas, Arkansas, and Montana, Houston University, and Washingon University.  She is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program.  Rogers has two sons and three grandsons and lives with her husband in Colorado.

Sat, Oct 10: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

Tue, Oct 20: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Major Jackson to read.  “Jackson knows the truth of black magic. It is a magic as simple as the belief in humanity that subverts racism, or the esoteric and mystical magic of making jazz, the music of hope and love.” —Aafa Weaver.  Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry, Hoops (Norton: 2006), a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry. and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.  Poems by Major Jackson have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Post Road, Triquarterly, The New Yorker, among other literary journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.  Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Vermont and a faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. In 2006-2007, he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Sat, Nov 14: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

Tue, Nov 17: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet Sebastian Matthews to read.  Sebastian Matthews is the author of the poetry collection We Generous (Red Hen Press) and a memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps (W. W. Norton).  He co-edited, with Stanley Plumly, Search Party: Collected Poem s of William Matthews. Matthews teaches at Warren Wilson College and serves on the faculty at Queens College Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing. His poetry and prose has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, New England, Review, Poetry Daily, Poets & Writers, Seneca Review, The Sun, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Writer’s Almanac, among others. Matthews co-edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal, and serves as poetry consultant for Ecotone:
Re-Imagining Place.

Sat, Dec 12: Village Square Booksellers, 32 The Square, Bellows Falls, In the Café, 2:00p.m. – 4:00 p.m.  Open Mic River Voices Poetry Reading on the second Saturday of each month.  The session is open mic, with individuals reading their own poetry or poems from their favorite poet.  Listeners are welcome to attend.  Light refreshments are served.  To reserve a place at the table, e-mail vsbooks@sover.net or call (802) 463-9404.

2010:

Mon, Feb 22: Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, exact time not yet determined.  Poet David Shapiro to read.  David Shapiro (born January 2, 1947) is an American poet, literary critic, and art historian and . Shapiro has written some twenty volumes of poetry, literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of thirteen, and his first book was published at the age of eighteen. Shapiro has taught at Columbia, Bard College, Cooper Union, Princeton University, and William Paterson University. He wrote the first monograph on John Ashbery, the first book on Jim Dine’s paintings, the first book on Piet Mondrian’s flower studies, and the first book on Jasper Johns’ drawings. He has translated Rafael Alberti’s poems on Pablo Picasso, and the writings of the Sonia and Robert Delaunay. Shapiro has won National Endowment for the HumanitiesNational Endowment for the Arts fellowships, been nominated for a National Book Award, and been the recipient of numerous grants for his work. Shapiro lives in Riverdale, The Bronx, New York City, with his wife and son.

• Again, if you become aware of an event that isn’t posted above, please let me know. My apologies if I have left off anything of importance to any of you, but it can always be corrected in the next Vermont Poetry Newsletter.

our finitude as human beings
is encompassed by the infinity of language

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Your fellow Poet,

Ron Lewis

The soundtrack wasn’t the late-night bop sounds of Symphony Sid and I wasn’t driving with one hand while my other hand typed my spontaneous beatific scroll. I was listening to Bob Dylan’s newest album on my stereo and I had one hand on the wheel and my Mapquest directions in the other — but I was indeed on the road, first stop Lowell, Mass., hometown of Jack Kerouac and my destination for a meeting with the folks who have organized that town’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which was held last October for the very first time and is already an impressive event.

Allen Ginsberg's famous photo of young Jack Kerouac

I arrived early, and so had a chance to explore downtown Lowell, which reminded me very much of my own old home town of Yonkers, N.Y., where even now I can walk around those familiar streets and conjure up visions of the city’s once-bustling business district in the old carpet mill buildings and the old sugar refinery and even the old Herald Statesman newspaper office now converted into a library branch because the newspaper was homogenized and sanitized and standardized and blended until it disappeared. Lowell  felt like that, right down to the impressive old Lowell Sun newspaper office, with its big rooftop signs — two of them — spelling out the name of the paper, S-U-N.

Here's a view of downtown Lowell, including the Lowell Sun building

I then met with the poetry festival organizers, with whom I’d been put in touch by Robert Pinsky, the former U.S. poet laureate who teaches in the graduate program at Boston University and was the featured poet at the inaugural festival held last October in Lowell.

Robert Pinsky

(Pinsky was the featured poet at the first annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival in 1998 — which I founded and still run in conjunction with River Union Stage of Frenchtown, N.J. — and was good enough to come back to read again in 2007 for the 10th anniversary of our readings in New Jersey, which have also featured such literary lights as Louise Gluck, Pulitzer Prize winner and another former U.S. poet laureate; Pulitzer winner Paul Muldoon; National Book Award winner Gerald Stern; and other great poets includling Thomas Lux, Diane Wakoski, Maria Mazzioti Gillan, Joe Weil, BJ Ward, Charles H. Johnson, Stephen Dobyns and many others. The 2009 Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, scheduled for October, will feature yet another great poet — Rita Dove.)

So I met with the Lowell event’s organizers: Michael Ansara, who arranged the lunch, joined by LZ Dunn, who works for the city of Lowell as well as its cultural agency, and Paul Marion of UMass/Lowell.  We had a great exchange of ideas and thoughts on ways the Lowell event might be turned into an even greater event than it already is, including the idea of finding ways to connection with the thriving poetry scene in another old industrial city with deep literary roots — Paterson, N.J., associated with a couple of pretty good poets named William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg.

I also had a fascinating but all-too-brief talk with Paul Marion, who it turns out has been the mover and shaker behind many of the efforts to properly honor Kerouac in his home town — and was involved in the cataloguing of Kerouac’s correspondence — including letters Kerouac exchanged with the late, great poet Robert Lax, who was my friend and mentor. I knew about Lax’s friendship with Kerouac, who was fascinated by his Zen/Christian minimalist approach to life and art; in fact, I know that Lax was reading some of Kerouac’s novels in the months just before he died; but I was startled to learn during the conversation that Marion was familiar with Robert Lax and was excited to meet someone — me — who had known Lax.

Here’s a photo taken of Lax by Paul Spaeth, curator of the Thomas Merton/Robert Lax Archives at St. Bonaventure University, when Lax visited the school in 1990 during a brief sojourn back to the U.S. from his home on the island of Patmos, Greece:

Robert Lax

The one downside to the meeting in Lowell: Turns out the 2009 event in Lowell will be held on the same weekend as Rita Dove’s scheduled appearance Oct. 17 at the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival in New Jersey, so I won’t be able to make it back up to Lowell for this year’s event — here’s hoping I can make it in 2010.

And, because even Kerouac’s “On the Road” scroll manuscript had a begininng and had to finally end, so too this post must end. What better way than with a sampling from Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. He listed thirty “essentials.” Here are my favorites:
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
20. Believe in the holy contour of life

Today’s post is from Cathe at Davis Library:

 Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, edited by Robert Pinsky

I’ve always liked poetry anthologies, and this is a super new one, edited by Robert Pinsky, a former poet laureate of the United States. 

The CD which accompanies the book is a plus–Pinsky himself reads about twenty of the poems and adds an occasional dry comment of his own. I’m such a visual learner that I loved reading and listening at the same time; that added greatly to my understanding of some of the more complex poems.

Pinsky has compiled a rich and fascinating mix of poets and poems, all the works chosen because they are perfect for reading aloud.

Here is how he puts it: “I have worked to make a collection of poems attractive for the reader to say aloud, or to imagine saying aloud…My one strict rule is that everything here…conveys the vocal feeling of poetry: an art as urgent and various as the human voice itself, encompassing all that a voice can express.”

Finally. How long has it been since my last confused and bemused post on returning to the grey streets of Melbourne? Too long. So, of course, there’s a bit of an unhealthy build-up of news. I myself don’t like to read long tracts of text on the internet, so I’ll try not to afflict you too much with the blowing of my own trumpet.

Before that, a few reading recommendations.  First, Robert Pinsky’s deceptively deep and broad short book, written in reflecting on the impact of the USA’s Favourite Poem Project, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry.  Pinsky has a lot of intelligent things to say about exactly what it is that poetry is and does, in distinction to other artforms, but especially in its unique role in the culture, its ability to reconcile the individual and communal.  Read it.

I’d also say hunt down, at any cost, the poetry of Eunice De Souza.  A wise, courageous, precise poet from Pune, India, who I read in an Oxford anthology while I was in India.

And, go and see Kafka’s Monkey at the Malthouse.  A provocative, multi-layered allegory, performed in stunning physicality by Kathryn Hunter.  If you want it reduced, it’s about the process and cost of becoming human.

OK, so now me.  I’ve just come back from the Woorilla Poetry Prize.  Congratulations Bob Morrow on winning.  I carried away the runner-up certificate, but also the glow of being in good company.  Kevin Gillam had two poems commended (Hi, Kevin, if you’re out there!).

The other thing that’s just arrived this week is confirmation of the Australian Poetry Centre’s Cafe Poet in Residence program.  It’s extended to (now) five of us in Melbourne.  After A Minor Place in Brunswick mysteriously baulked, I approached a little joint on Albert St, La Paloma.  Actually, perhaps I shouldn’t say who they are.  They’re not interested in publicity.  It’s a lowwcal place for lowwcal people…  Great coffee, and a place to sit regularly and write, and watch, and write, and listen, and be…  Thankyou APC.  Check out http://www.australianpoetrycentre.org.au/?page_id=379 or http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cafe-Poets/6899549657 for more.

I also won the Rosemary Dobson Prize for an unpublished poem, for Secessionist. http://www.arts.act.gov.au/pages/page117.asp

Oh, please, that’s enough!…

Robert Pinsky was first appointed by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in 1997, to be the ninth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry and the 39th person to occupy the Library’s poetry seat. He was then reappointed for a second term in 1998. A versatile scholar known for his probing poetry, Mr. Pinsky has wide interests and accomplishments in translation and in making poetry accessible through digital technology on the Internet. In commenting on his own appointment, Mr. Pinsky said: “American poetry has been one of our great national achievements. Along with the honor of following the American poets who have held this post, I have an opportunity to continue our appreciation of that treasure. I am very pleased.”

Mr. Pinsky teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University. He is the author of five books of poetry: Sadness and Happiness (1975); An Explanation of America (1980), awarded the Saxifrage Prize; History of My Heart (1984), which won the William Carlos Williams Prize; The Want Bone (1990); and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which won the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. In 1999 he co-edited, with Maggie Dietz, Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology. He has also published four books of criticism, including The Sounds of Poetry (1998), Poetry and the World (1988), and The Situation of Poetry (1977); two books of translation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass); and a computerized novel, Mindwheel (1985). His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, Poetry magazine’s Oscar Blumenthal prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.

*

Links:

Poet and the Poem – Robert Pinsky interviewed by Grace Cavalieri, with lots of readings. Audio MP3 Download. To read the interview in text format, click here.

“Poetry in the Public Sphere” May 13, 2002 – Video in Real Player format (50:56). Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000, returned to the Library of Congress to host an event celebrating poetry in public life.

“Poetry and American Memory” October 8, 1998 Video in Real Player format (1:27:16). With this lecture on “Poetry and American Memory,” Mr. Pinsky officially opened the Library’s 1998-1999 poetry and literature series.

No Tiara, No Crown - What do you do when Milosz tells you, “The pope liked this poem very much”?

An essay by Robert Pinsky

Favorite Poem Project - The Favorite Poem Project was developed by Robert Pinsky and designed for Americans to share their favorite poems. The Favorite Poem Project Web site includes 50 short video documentaries showcasing individual Americans reading and speaking personally about poems they love.

“Thrilling Difficulty: An Interview with Robert Pinsky“ – Interviewed by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Guernica, November 2007

“Spreading the Word” – Interviewed by Kiera Butler, Mother Jones, October 16, 2007

“Poetry and Education: Robert Pinsky on the Future of Poetry” – Interviewed by Joyce Wilson, Poetry Porch 3, April, 1996

“Poetry, Computers, and Dante’s Inferno: An Online Conference with Robert Pinsky“ – Transcript of a live online conference with Robert Pinsky as it appeared in The Atlantic Monthly Online on the America Online network, April 19, 1995

“Why Don’t Modern Poems Rhyme, Etc. Frequently Asked Questions about the Business of Verse.” – Robert Pinsky writing in Slate, April 17, 2008

“In Praise of Difficult Poetry” - Robert Pinsky writing in Slate, April 23, 2007

“Great Poems About Sex: An Anthology for Valentine’s Day.” – Robert Pinsky writing in Slate, February 14, 2007

Poems Out Loud - Robert Pinsky’s National Poetry Month 2009 blog about the fine art of reading poems out loud.

*

Poems On-Line:

An Explanation of America: A Love of Death

City Elegies

Doctor Frolic

Essay on Psychiatrists

Glory

History of My Heart

Impossible to Tell

Paschal

Poem about People

Poem of Disconnected Parts

Ralegh’s Prizes

Shirt

The Hearts

Poems About People

First Things to Hand

The Refinery

Ginza Samba

Poem With Refrains

The Night Game

Ode To Meaning

To Television

The Green Piano

At Pleasure Bay

*

Video:

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I thought I would interview one of the poets I admire most, Robert Pinsky, who served as US Poet Laureate from 1997-2000 and has authored several books, including a brilliant collection of poetry, The Figured Wheel.

When you were serving as the US Poet Laureate, you started the “Favorite Poem” project. My favorite poem is the intricately beautiful, 14th century poem, “Pearl.” I also greatly enjoy biblical poetry like the Psalms and the Song of Solomon. What are some of your favorite poems?

*Among many: George Gascoigne’s “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” William Carlos
 Willliams’ “Fine Work With Pitch and Copper,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the
 Fishhouses,” Fulke Greville’s “Elegy for Philip Sidney,” William Butler
 Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” Robert Frost’s
”Directive,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “To Margaret,” James McMichaels’ “Four 
Good Things,” Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Miss Blount,” John Keats’ “Ode to 
a Nightingale,” Wallace Stevens’ “Madame La Fleurie,” Emily Dickinson’s 
”Further in Summer than the Birds,” Ben Jonson’s “His Excuse for Loving.” *

I have loved reading through many of your collected poems in The Figured Wheel, including “The Childhood of Jesus” and the fantasy about Jesus and Isolt. Recently, I noticed your poem, “Shirt,” included in Bedford/St. Martin’s 250 Poems anthology, obviously an editorial favorite. Which of your own poems are particularly important to you and why?

*An impossible question for me, Jane — like many poets I tend to focus on 
the most recent. “An Explanation of America” matters to me as my most daring
 experiment and because it is addressed to my oldest daughter.*

You have lived the life of a public poet for many years. What do you believe are the roles and responsibilities of a poet in our culture today?

* As a poet, the responsibility is simply to write as well and truly as
possible. To undertake the most challenging and important subjects. To
respect the art and to hand it on, transformed if you can manage that.



As a person, the responsibilities are many and complicated, of course.*

You have also taught students to write poetry for many years, and you are currently teaching at Boston University. What do you believe young poets need to learn in order to strengthen their craft?

*The poet must read the way a cook eats, or the way a filmmaker looks at
 film, or a musician listens.*

I noticed that on your website, “Poems Out Loud: Celebrating National Poetry Month with Robert Pinsky,” there is a recording of you reading Milton’s “Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint.” I teach this poem to my students every semester, and I am drawn to its references to Alcestis, since I also enjoy teaching Euripides’ play, “Alcestis.” What drew you to this poem originally, and what inspired you to include it on “Poems Out Loud”?

*All of that learning, that immense gift, all that ambition and mastery–
all concentrated on a single, poignant, human moment of personal emotion.*


National Poetry Month is a busy time for poets. I’ve been participating in Robert Lee Brewer’s “Poetic Asides” challenge to poets to write a poem-a-day this month (and it is a challenge!). “Poems Out Loud” alone is enough to keep you busy, but have you been enjoying any other poetic projects this month?

*
I have some reservations about the idea of marketing poetry: an art is not a
brand of soap. Poetry is fundamental, like dancing or cuisine. I have recently enjoyed reading poems by Joel Brouwer, Terrance Hayes, Jay Hopler,
Elise Partridge, Louise Glück. Also reciting to myself some of the poems I
 mentioned in response to question 1.
I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but those personal, particular experiences
of poems mean a lot to me. Official celebrations and promotions, less.*

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me and readers of The Poetry Place! Do you have a sweet, invigorating viaticum, some words of wisdom for poets and poetry-lovers, to share in closing?

*Here’s a two-line poem that has been rattling in my head for months now, 
pleasing me and inspiring me — there was a wonderful discussion of it on Slate’s “Fray”:

*

*On Love, on Grief, on every human thing,

Time sprinkles Lethe’s water with his wing.



There’s just something about it — the sounds, the ideas, the brevity, all
coming together. It’s a good example for me of why I love the art. (Author
 is Walter Savage Landor.)*

Many thanks, Robert!

*Thanks back to you, Jane, for asking.*

I don’t have a favorite poem. But if I did, it might be this one.

Antique

Robert Pinsky

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

- ST

NOTE: The Big Red Apple is now TheBigRedApple.net

To view this post at its new location click HERE!

I’m back in NYC and super excited about this week’s events! I will relate my adventures in Boston in a later post but these announcements must come first.

Tonight start your week off with some funky dance music at Beauty Bar:

Eugene and returning guest DJ Brian Blackout braid the tunes and work out the kinks (not the band) for the dancefloor. However, The Kinks might be heard as DJs Go-Karff & Sandman present the “Lovedolls Superstar” rock extravaganza in the front room. Beloved bartenders Hillery & Sam take care of the bar with $5 Olive Vodka drinks and $3 Buds all night. No Cover.

Also tonight you can hear the real deal on Dylan when the world’s preeminent Dylan biographer, Clinton Heylin, spins his tales at Spoonbill & Sugartown Booksellers. His new book, Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1963, is due out in April.

National Poetry Month is about to begin; you can get a head start tonight at McNally Jackson Books, where the all-star lineup includes a couple of Pulitzer winners and several National Book Critics Circle honorees- Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Mark Strand, C.K. Williams and Robert Pinsky.

On Tuesday take advantage of the (somewhat) warmer weather and make the trek out to 3rd Ward for their newest monthly event- THE…

On its debut night, 3rd Ward’s Return of the Wizard is calling out Mario Kart fanatics for a battle to the death on Nintendo 64. We’ll pit you and your friends against each other in high stakes video game competition projected onto 10×10 ft. screens. Relive your glory days – minus the grape soda and nagging parents – plus ice cold beers, cash prizes, live beats from DJ Tanner and the month long title of 3rd Ward’s Video Game King or Queen. At 3rd Ward, it’s co-ed style — girls, it’s time to get the boys back for all their years of not letting you play!

You may remember my stories about the Dorkbots and their absurd antics; on Wednesday you can see them for yourself at Location One. What could be more appropriate for April Fool’s Day than people doing strange things with electricity?

On Thursday the St. Mark’s Bookshop Reading Series at Solas presents Poems for the Millenium: Volume Three:

The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the Ninteenth century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism.  The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism. Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet and Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Jeffrey C. Robinson is Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Also on Thursday Black Taxi (whose benefit concert for Studio 42 I posted some time ago) will be playing at the Annex. Here is the video from their single “Wanted Man”:

Stay tuned for more events and of course the details of my Boston adventures.

Robert Pinsky came to town Thursday evening, and I went with my friend and Poetry Friday regular Nandini to hear him speak about the Favorite Poem Project. How lucky are we, having a three-time U.S. Poet Laureate visit our local middle school? Natick, by the way, is about 15 west of Boston, not far from Mr. Pinsky’s own home, though still exciting local news having him here.

The event was part of the Natick Reads program, a month-long, town-wide celebration to encourage reading and promote literacy, organized by our two great local libraries. This year’s program is devoted to poetry–excellent choice! Now here’s where I might have inserted a photo from the Robert Pinsky event, had I remembered to take the memory card out of my computer and put it back in my camera. Nandini, do you have any photos over at your site? (Late update: Thanks for posting one!)

In any case, to say, “hear him speak” is actually misleading, because while Robert Pinsky did share his thoughts on poetry, and very eloquently so and with good humor, the event was not a lecture. The Favorite Poem Project is about the sharing of poetry and documenting the joy and meaning of poetry to Americans. (Some 18,000 Americans from all walks of life volunteered to share their favorite poems when the project was first announced in the late 1990s.) Thursday night’s presentation included inspiring video segments from the third anthology of the project, An Invitation to Poetry, followed by several local residents (“Natick-ites” or “Natick-ers” a funny sidebar debate), sharing poems that have special meaning to them. Among those recited was ”How to Eat a Poem” by Eve Merriam:

Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
     may run down your chin.

Read the rest of the poem here.

To view some of the clips from the Favorite Poem Project–both adults and kids reciting and talking about their favorite poems–go here. It’s great to learn that the project has also had the ripple effect of inspiring school classes, writing groups, and communities to create their own versions of Favorite Poem. Poetry is alive!

At the request of an audience member, Robert Pinsky also read two of his own poems from his book Gulf Music. That was a treat. See Nandini’s site to read one of them, “Antique.” 

For all you near-Natick-ites who might be interested, next week’s local poetry events include a poetry slam at The Center for the Arts Natick (TCAN).

This week’s Poetry Friday roundup is hosted by Elaine Magliaro at Wild Rose Reader.

And great catching up with you, Nandini!

A reprint of a press release of interest.

Art Beyond Borders: Robert Pinsky
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 6 PM

Fullerton Hall
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Free admission

While serving as U.S. Poet Laureate for an unprecedented three terms from 1997 to 2000, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, which gave a resonant voice to America’s vigorous and varied poetry audience. Pinsky has been active as a critic, poet, translator of verse, and recently authored a prose book, The Life of David (2005). His newest book—his seventh—is Gulf Music (2007), winner of the 2008 Theodore Roethke Prize. Pinsky is a professor at Boston University and the poetry editor for the online magazine, Slate. He has also written the “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post, and has been a regular commentator on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In 2003, he made a cameo appearance on the popular television show The Simpsons.

Co-sponsored by Poetry Foundation and Art Institute of Chicago

360 DEGREES: ART BEYOND BORDERS
brings together Chicago’s leading cultural institutions—Poetry Foundation, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Chicago Council on Global Affairs—to celebrate cultural, social, and political life around the world. Leading museum directors, renowned musicians, poets from around the world, and cultural leaders explore the role of art and culture in our ever-shrinking globe.

www.poetryfoundation.org

What’s a laureate? The word comes from the Middle English, by way of Latin, and it all derives from the practice of honoring or recognizing someone’s great achievement by crowning the person with a wreath of laurel.

Dove? Well, of course, it’s a symbol of peace, and recently I found myself remembering a line from good old Sir Thomas Malory: “And anon there came in a dove at a window, and in her mouth there seemed a little censer of gold, and therewithal there was such a savoir as all the spicery of the world had been there.”

That’s  from “Le Morte d’Arthur,” which really has nothing to do with the poet I’m about to write about, but it’s my way of finally getting to the point and announcing that this year’s 12th annual Delaware Valley Poetry Festival will feature former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove.

RITA DOVE

She’s one of our greatest poets, and she’ll give a public reading on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 8 p.m. at the beautifully restored Prallsville Mills in Stockton, N.J., a small town nestled along the Delaware River in Hunterdon County, N.J., about an hour from Philadelphia and about 90 minutes from New York City.

I started this event, and coordinate it with my friends Keith Strunk and Laura Swanson of the River Union Stage theater group in Frenchtown, N.J. Details about tickets and other information — including plans for two book signings — will be announced in late spring/early summer. Meanwhile, though, mark your calendars. You can read and hear samples of Rita Dove’s poetry at the Academy of American Poets Web site (www. poets.org) or her own home page at University of Virginia ( http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/).

Rita will join an impressive list of poets featured at previous Delaware Valley Poetry Festivals, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gluck, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon, National Book Award winner Gerald Stern, acclaimed poets Thomas Lux, Stephen Dobyns, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Diane Wakoski, and many of New Jersey’s finest homegrown poets including Charles H. Johnson, B.J. Ward and Joe Weil.

This past October, we shifted gears  a bit, and featured nine outstanding younger poets recommended by some of the poets listed above.  It was an memorable weekend of amazingly skillful, intelligent and passionate writing and readings by artists with an wide array of backgrounds and styles but a shared gift of being able to move people with their words. Google the names of any of these rising poetry stars — Peter Covino, Janet Foxman, Khalil Murrell, Metta Sama, Matthew Siegel, Lonnie Manns, Jose Rodriguez, Michelle Lerner and Brian Trimboli — and you’re in for a treat.

And while you’re at it, visit the Web site of River Union Stage, where there’s a link to the Delaware Valley Poetry Festival, with more information and more links to poems by Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, Paul Muldoon and the other great poets who have preceded Rita Dove on the truly remarkable list of artists who’ve joined us here to bring great poetry to the wilds of western New Jersey.