COME AND TRY OUT YOUR NEW WORK ON US!
Evanston Public Library
Church & Orrington
1:30-4:30 — Room 108
Past leaders and readers and all poets welcome. Drop in, have poems critiqued, and participate in an ongoing discussion of poetry and poetics. Sessions are free* and no registration is required.
Ruth Goring, senior manuscript editor in the books division at University of Chicago Press, loves the Rhino Poetry Forum and has been attending for years. For several seasons she also facilitated the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Big Table peer workshop (which she hears is likely to be revived soon, hurray!). She has published one collection, Yellow Doors (WordFarm, 2004), and her poems have also appeared (or will soon) in Comstock Review, CALYX, Raving Dove, The Externalist, protestpoems.org, Alligator Juniper, Chicago Quarterly Review, Verse Wisconsin, and elsewhere. She’s beginning to shop around her second manuscript, a collection of poems set in Colombia, South America, where she grew up.
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Topic: Breaking Our Readers’ Hearts
Poems of witness and protest are some of the hardest to write. How do we move beyond ranting to create work (individual poems and whole books) that is textured and evocative while sounding a compelling call to justice and peace? Ruth will condense some of the most helpful pointers and guidelines she gleaned from Martín Espada’s 2009 poetry manuscript class at the annual writers’ workshop of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences (UMass Boston). More broadly, she’ll talk about the value of communities of socially conscious poets. If you have recently written a poem protesting war or oppression, bring it for appreciation and critique!
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Bring 17 or more copies (no longer than two pages) of work you want critiqued.
*$5 – $10 donation appreciated
This project has been partially supported by a grant from Poets & Writers, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
