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SEVENTH
ANNUAL PALM BEACH POETRY FESTIVAL OFFERS
EIGHT WRITING WORKSHOPS
with
Stuart
Dischell, Jane Hirshfield, Thomas Lux, Heather McHugh,
Vijay
Seshadri, Ellen Bryant Voigt, C.D. Wright, Dean Young
Applications due by November 2, 2010
THIRTEEN
PUBLIC EVENTS include
·
Poetry readings, talks, panel discussion by
workshop faculty
·
Robert Pinsky, former United States Poet
Laureate, will read his poems solo, and accompanied by local
jazz musicians, January 19.
·
Slam champions D. Blair & Taylor Mali will
perform at late night coffee house, January 22.
·
Two Workshop participant readings Free:
January 20 & 21.
Tickets
on sale, October 15, 2010
(Delray Beach, FL – August 13, 2010)
Miles Coon,
Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival (PBPF) announced
today that the seventh annual festival will be presented
again in partnership with Old School Square in Delray Beach
for six days, January 17-22, 2011.
“Eight critically acclaimed poets, all
revered teachers, will come to Delray Beach to teach poetry
workshops for qualified writers. This is a terrific learning
opportunity for local poets and for poets from around the
globe,” said Coon.
“And for members of the public, we have
eleven events including enthralling readings, engaging daily
talks, and a panel discussion by the faculty poets, as well
as performances by D. Blair & Taylor Mali, two of
America’s greatest spoken word artists.”
“I am especially thrilled to announce that
Robert Pinsky, the United States Poet Laureate from
1997-2000, will read his poems, both solo and
accompanied by local jazz musicians on January 19. Mr.
Pinsky, in addition to being a world-renowned poet, was a
featured character on the Simpsons! His appearance will be
a unique event, like none other.”
“In addition to serving the writing community
through our professional workshops, the Palm Beach Poetry
Festival will once again offer numerous opportunities for
the public to hear truly great poetry, written from and for
our time, read by poets who engage and enthrall the
audience,” added Coon. “They are a diverse group,
ethnically, demographically and aesthetically. When people
hear them, they will hear America singing.”
+ Featured Readings
The festival will host daily talks about how
poems are made at 2 pm and featured poets’ readings at 8 p.m,
January 18-22. Special guest Robert Pinsky will give a
reading January 19 at 8 p.m.with live jazz music, following
the Palm Beach Poetry Festival Annual Gala.
Special Featured Poet:
ROBERT PINSKY
United States Poet Laureate (1997–2000)
Translator, Essayist, and Teacher
Robert Pinsky's first two terms as United
States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism,
and such national enthusiasm in response, that the Library
of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term.
Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to
identifying and invigorating poetry's place in the world. As
Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky became a public ambassador for
poetry, founding the
Favorite Poem Project,
in which thousands of Americans – of varying backgrounds,
all ages, and from every state – shared their favorite
poems.
Elegant and tough, vividly imaginative,
Pinsky's poems have earned praise for their wild musical
energy and ambitious range.
Gulf Music
(FSG, fall 2007) is his most recent volume of poetry. His
The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems
1966-1996
was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore
Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English
Speaking Union. Pinsky's Tanner Lectures at Princeton
University were published as
Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry
(Princeton University Press, 2002). His other books about
poetry include
Poetry and the World,
nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and
The Sounds of Poetry,
a brief guide treasured by many young poets. Robert Pinsky's
landmark, best-selling translation of
The Inferno of Dante
received the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry
and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation.
The poetry editor for the online magazine
Slate, for seven years Pinsky appeared regularly on The
News Hour with Jim Lehrer. He writes the weekly Poet's
Choice column for the Washington Post. He was elected in
1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Pinsky’s
poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The
Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry
Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetry
anthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at
Boston University. Robert Pinsky is also the winner of the
PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the
Lenore Marshall, the National Foundation for Jewish
Culture's 2006 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Literary
Arts, and the 2008 Theodore M. Roethke Memorial Poetry
Award. He is one of the few members of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons.
Coffeehouse Performance Poetry:
(Late Saturday Night, January 22)
D. Blair
An award winning Detroit based poet and
singer-songwriter, D. Blair is a 2010 Callaloo Fellow
and a National Poetry Slam Champion. His first book of
poetry, Moonwalking was recently released by
Penmanship Books. His band The Boyfriends released The
Line on Repeatable Silence Records in June 2009. In the
words of Metro Times journalist Melissa Giannini,
BLAIR focuses his work on the hope that rises from the
ashes of despair. Blair has performed on bills with
Stevie Wonder, Oscar winner Michael Moore, Mike Doughty,
Bitch and Animal, Justin Bond, members of Sweet Honey in the
Rock, Richie Havens, The Butchies, Tribe 8, Wilco, Cat Power
and others. He was the January 2005 HBO Def Poetry Jam
Website Featured Poet, and has been nominated for 7 Detroit
Music Awards, including a 2007 nod for Outstanding Acoustic
Artist and The Metro Times Best Urban Folk Poet. Blair has
toured the United States and Europe and performed in South
Africa both solo and as part of Walk & Squawk's The Walking
Project of which he is a co-writer and cast member. He's
performed at New York's historic CBGBs, The Knitting
Factory, The San Francisco Public Library, at Miyagi's on
L.A.s Sunset Strip, Detroit's Hart Plaza and Magic Stick and
with a string section at the home of the Detroit Symphony
Orchestra.
He teaches poetry and music classes in
Detroit Public Schools, Hannan House Senior Center, the YMCA
and lectures at universities, colleges and high schools
across the country.
Taylor Mali
One of the
most well known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam
movement, Taylor Mali was recently featured on CNN.
He is one of the few people in the world to have no job
other than that of "poet." Articulate, accessible,
passionate, and downright funny, Mali studied drama in
Oxford with members of The Royal Shakespeare Company and
puts those skills of presentation to work in all his
performances. He was one of the original poets to appear on
the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry
and was the "Armani-clad villain" of Paul Devlin's 1997
documentary film SlamNation.
Born
in New York City into a family some of whose members have
lived there since the early 1600s, Taylor Mali is an
unapologetic WASP, making him a rare entity in spoken word,
which is often considered to be an art form influenced by
the inner city and dominated either by poets of color or
otherwise imbued with the spirit of hip-hop. He is the
author of two books of poetry, The Last Time As We Are
(Write Bloody Books 2009) and What Learning Leaves
(Hanover 2002), and four CDs of spoken word. He received a
New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2001 to develop
"Teacher! Teacher!" a one-man show about poetry, teaching,
and math, which won the jury, prize for best solo
performance at the 2001 U. S. Comedy Arts Festival. Formerly
president of Poetry Slam Incorporated, the non-profit
organization that oversees all poetry slams in North
America, Taylor Mali makes his living entirely as a
spoken-word and voiceover artist these days, traveling
around the country performing and teaching workshops as well
as doing occasional commercial voiceover work.
Eight Workshops for Qualified Writers of Poetry:
Workshops, limited to 12 qualified
participants and three auditors, provide a meaningful level
of discussion, and careful, informed attention to everyone’s
work. Beginning poets, shy about sharing their poems, should
consider
auditing
a workshop as a great way to learn by observing and
listening.
NOW LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE
with
Stuart Dischell
This intense and fast-moving workshop will
consider the conscious and unconscious choices poets face
regarding the structures and strategies of their poems.
Stuart Dischell
is the author of Good Hope Road, a
National Poetry Series Selection (Viking, 1993), Evenings
& Avenues (Penguin, 1996), Dig Safe (Penguin,
2003), and Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007). His poems
have been widely published in journals such as The
Atlantic, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, and
The Kenyon Review. A recipient of awards from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts
Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Dischell
has taught at Boston University, New Mexico State
University, the Sarah Lawrence Summer Seminar for Writers,
and Low Residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson
College. He currently teaches in the Master of Fine Arts
Program in Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro.
ENLARGING POEMS
with
Jane Hirshfield
The “enlarging” of this workshop’s title is
not about length, but about possibility, stretching from
familiar ground toward new reaches of language, of voice, of
subject, or of self. The workshop will be devoted primarily
to writing new poems, each day bringing a different set of
energies, craft strategies, and approaches to that task.
Jane Hirshfield
has won many honors, including the Poetry Center Book Award,
fellowships from the NEA, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller
Foundations, the California Poetry Medal, and the 70th
Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement from
The Academy of American Poets. Her six books of poetry
include After (HarperCollins, 2006), named a best
book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The S.F.
Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and
Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award. She has taught at
UC Berkeley, Bennington College, and elsewhere. Her poems
appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic,
and five editions of The Best American Poems. Her
new collection of poems (Come, Thief) will be
published next year.
WORD BY WORD, LINE BY LINE
with
Thomas Lux
This workshop will pay close attention, in
minute detail, to all the ele-ments that go into writing a
poem with word-by-word, line-by-line readings.
Thomas Lux
is a long-time friend of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His
latest collection is God Particles
(Houghton Mifflin 2008). Other books include The Cradle
Place; The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems:
1975-1995, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry
Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems:
1970-1975; and Split Horizon, winner of the
Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. His distinguished teaching
career includes twenty-seven years on the writing faculty
and as Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah
Lawrence. He has taught at Emerson College, Warren Wilson’s
MFA Program for Writers, and other universities. A finalist
for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and recipient
of three NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lux holds
the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting
Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
AN ARCHITECTURE OF SENSES
with
Heather McHugh
This
workshop will examine the ways in which poems can radiate
senses, paying particular attention to details of their
design. Looking closely at published poems to illustrate
some principles, participants will apply the same alertness
to their own work.
Heather
McHugh
is the
author of eight poetry collections, a collection of literary
essays and three books of translation. Her honors include
two NEA grants, a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, a
Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and one of the first
United States Artists awards. She has served as a Chancellor
of the Academy of American Poets, and is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2009, she was
awarded the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." She serves
as a visiting faculty in the MFA Program for Writers at
Warren Wilson College, and is Milliman Writer-in-Residence
at the University of Washington in Seattle.
THE PLOT OF THE POEM
with
Vijay Seshadri
This
workshop will look at the plots of narrative poems, dramatic
poems driven by a persona, and pure lyrics, to determine the
ways in which plot, richly and broadly conceived as the
proper arrangement of action both real and symbolic, creates
meaning intended and unintended in a poem while
simultaneously creating the vessel in which such meaning
abides.
Vijay
Seshadri
won the James Laughlin Award for his collection of poems
The Long Meadow.
His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared
in AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard,
Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review,
Shenandoah, The Threepenny Review, Verse, The Yale Review,
the Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer,
Bomb, The San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, and
in many anthologies. Seshadri’s honors include grants from
the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation;
The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize;
and the MacDowell Colony's Fellowship for Distinguished
Poetic Achievement. He was educated at Oberlin College and
Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
THE CRAFT OF POETRY
with
Ellen Bryant Voigt
The overall
stimulus and focus of this workshop will provide a lens
through which the participants go past aesthetic preference
and judgment toward analysis and discovery.
Ellen
Bryant Voigt
has published
seven volumes of poetry – Claiming
Kin (1976), The Forces of Plenty (1983), The
Lotus Flowers (1987), Two Trees (1992), Kyrie
(1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award, Shadow of Heaven (2002), a finalist for the
National Book Award, and Messenger: New and Selected
Poems (2007), a finalist for both the NBA and the
Pulitzer. She co-edited an anthology of essays, Poets
Teaching Poets, and collected her own essays on craft in
The Flexible Lyric. Most recently, The Art of
Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, was published
in the Graywolf Press series of “little books” on craft.
Her honors include the Emily Clark Balch Award, Hanes
Poetry Award, Teasdale Award, an American Academy of Arts
and Letters Award, three Pushcart Prizes, inclusion in
Scribner's Best American Poetry, the Academy of
American Poets’ Fellowship, and grants from the NEA,
Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest
Fund. Voigt designed and directed the first low-residency
MFA Writing Program, and now teaches in its reincarnation at
Warren Wilson College. A former Vermont State Poet, she has
been inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and
served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
WRITING AT THE EDGES OF THINGS
with
C.D. Wright
Being
fierce, strange, calamitous, glowing, erroneous, blameless,
side-splitting, starless, right-brained, formidable and
unsure--now is the time to find the language compatible with
the poet’s condition. Whether one is writing to make amends,
to get even, to fill the void, to impress the father, or
just to pay off a few parking tickets – there are words for
those motives and there is a shape for those words.
C.D.
Wright
is the
author of more than a dozen books, most
recently, Rising, Falling, Hovering which won the
2009 Griffin Poetry Prize. Wright is recipient of
fellowships and awards from numerous institutions. With
photographer Deborah Luster, she published One Big Self:
Prisoners of Louisiana. The project won the Lange-Taylor
Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. On a
fellowship for writers from the Wallace Foundation, she
curated a “Walk-in Book of Arkansas,” a multi-media
exhibition that toured throughout her native state for two
years. In 2004 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she
was given the Robert Creeley Award and elected to membership
in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wright is on
the faculty at Brown University.
POETRY LAB
with
Dean Young
The emphasis
will be on the exploratory aspects of the work turned in –
not trying to fix or correct the poems, but concentrating on
identifying the important choices each work illustrates, the
implications of those choices in terms of relation to other
poems as well as that individual poem's aims and
accomplishments.
Dean
Young’s
books of poetry include
Primitive Mentor
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Embryoyo (McSweeney's,
2007); Ready-Made Bouquet (University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2005); Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize; Skid (2002), a finalist for
the Lenore Marshall Prize; First Course in Turbulence
(1999); Strike Anywhere (University Press of
Colorado, 1995), which won the Colorado Poetry Prize;
Beloved Infidel (Wesleyan, 1992); and Design with X
(1988). The Art of Recklessness, A Prose Exploration of
Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 2010. Young's
honors include a Stegner fellowship from Stanford
University, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Guggenheim Foundation. He has also received an Academy Award
in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His poems have appeared eight times in The Best American
Poetry series. Young received his MFA in Creative
Writing from Indiana University, and has taught at the
University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, in the low-residency
MFA program at Warren Wilson College, and at Loyola
University, in Chicago. He is currently the William
Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas, in
Austin.
How to Apply for PBPF Workshops:
Each PBPF workshop is limited to 12 qualified
participants and three auditors, who must apply for
admission and submit three poems that will be reviewed by an
independent reader with a graduate degree and editorial
experience. The admission process insures that all
participants will make meaningful contributions to
discussions. In addition, the workshops will help improve
editing skills and/or stimulate the writing of new poems.
Application forms are available on-line at
www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org,
where detailed workshop descriptions and faculty biographies
can be found. The deadline for this quick and convenient
application process is November 2, 2010.
Tuition for workshops is $725 and includes
five two-and-a-half hour workshop sessions; a one-on-one
conference; admission to all festival events, including
invitations to attend the festival gala and to read at a
free public event. Limited scholarship assistance may be
available. Auditor’s tuition for advanced workshops is
$350. Auditors fees include observation of the workshop and
attendance at all festival events except for the festival
gala.”
Additional PBPF Events:
+ High School Poetry Contest
Open to Palm Beach County public and private
high school students (grades 9-12), the sixth
annual poetry contest will once again be
judged by Dr. Jeff Morgan, professor of English at
Lynn University. Dr. Blaise Allen, contest
coordinator, will visit numerous high schools to encourage
students to participate. In addition to cash prizes, the
winner and four runners up will receive free tickets to
festival events and will have an opportunity to meet the
festival’s featured faculty and performance poets and to
pose for photos with them. All prize winning poems will be
published on the festival website. Entries must be
submitted by December 1, 2010.
+ Performance Poets in the Schools
D. Blair and Taylor Mali will visit two high
schools on Friday, January 22 where they will perform and
take questions from the audience.
About the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2011:
Eight faculty poets, a special guest poet and
two performance poets will be featured at eleven ticketed
public events, January 17-22, 2011 including readings, talks
and a lively panel discussion. In addition, the workshop
participants will give two afternoon readings, free to the
public. For a complete list of the public events, refer to
www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.
Tickets will go on sale October 15, 2010
through the festival website and at the Crest Theatre Box
Office at Old School Square. General Admission ticket
prices per event are $12/adult, $10/senior and $8/student.
Special student group rates are available.
Presented in partnership with Old School
Square, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival is sponsored by
Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, the Palm Beach
County Cultural Council, The Palm Beach Post, WXEL TV & FM
and Murder by the Sea, Delray Beach’s independent
bookseller. Robert Pinsky’s
appearance is presented in partnership with the Jazz Art
Music Society of Palm Beach. All
events will take place in the Crest Theatre and Vintage
Gymnasium of Old School Square in Delray Beach.
For more
information about the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2011,
please visit
www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.
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