Click the mp3 link below to hear Melissa Roxas read her poem Returning, from RHINO Poetry 2011.
You can read our interview with Melissa here.
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Open Mike 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Featured Poets 6:45 pm – 7:30 pm
Brothers K
500 Main St.
Evanston, IL
Erika L. Sánchez has been published in Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Witness, Anti, Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, Pleiades, Jezebel, and others. She holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico and was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain. You can find her blog at ohhellsnah.com and her articles on newstaco.com where she writes under the moniker Oh Hells Nah.
Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, VQR, New England Review, and elsewhere. She’s currently a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University.
This project has been partially supported by grants from Poets & Writers, Inc.
and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
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COME AND TRY OUT YOUR NEW WORK ON US!
Evanston Public Library
Church & Orrington
map
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.
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Steven Schroeder received his Ph.D. in Ethics and Society from the University of Chicago in 1982. He is the co-founder, with composer Clarice Assad, of the Virtual Artists Collective (a “virtual” gathering of musicians, poets, and visual artists), which has published five full-length poetry collections each year since it began in 2004. He teaches at the University of Chicago in Asian Classics and the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in After Hours, AmarilloBay, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Concho River Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the Cresset, Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2005, Georgetown Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Karamu, Macao Closer, Mid-America Poetry Review, Poetry East, Poetry Macao, Rambunctious Review, Rhino, Shichao, Sichuan Literature, Texas Review, TriQuarterly and other literary journals. He has published two chapbooks, Theory of Cats and Revolutionary Patience, and five full-length collections, Fallen Prose, The Imperfection of the Eye, Six Stops South, A Dim Sum of the Day Before, and (with Debby Sou Vai Keng) A Guest Giving Way Like Ice Melting: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Laozi. His most recent book (three short stories and a verse drama) is Four Truths.
Topic: Otherwise Occupied: Poetry Between Dying and Dying
This anniversary of John Donne’s death (31 March), approaching at a time occupied by occupations of one public space after another in the name of (almost) everybody, marks an appropriate moment for reflection on fear and religion by way of poetry. Donne’s career is a life in poetry poised between love and death – or, more properly, in love, in medias res, eye to eye with death in the arc (as Doris Humphrey suggested) between dying and dying. In a time and place marked by pervasive feelings of impending danger identified with death and politics, Donne embraced poetry as a sacramental act affirming the real presence of love. At a time when those feelings are familiar, that is where I propose to begin – by taking Donne as an exemplar of what can be done in poetry in medias res to nurture a res publica that is not twisted by fear toward violence.
Bring 17 or more copies (2 page limit) of a poem you want critiqued.*$5 – $10 donation appreciated.
This project has been partially supported by grants from Poets & Writers and the Illinois Arts Council.
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Ken Pobo is the author most recently of Ice and Gaywings (winner of the qarrtsiluni chapbook Contest, 2011), Trina and the Sky (winner of the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest, 2009),
and Glass Gardens (Word Press, 2009). He teaches creative writing and English at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, and has published four collections and twenty chapbooks to date. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies as well as such journals as Fifth Review, Hawaii Review, Atlanta Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Nimrod, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, and, we’re happy to say, RHINO 2011. Associate Editor Andrea Witzke Slot interviewed him in February 2012.
AWS: First of all, thank you, Ken, for taking time out of your busy teaching and writing schedule to interview with us here at Rhino. I’ve very much enjoyed getting to know your work. You are a prolific writer and use a wide range of voices and styles, with each book having a clear focus and/or thematic structure. I’m curious, though, how you might describe the defining features and writing style of your work as a whole? Which of your books do you feel best represent you and why?
KP: I have several approaches to writing poems. I enjoy writing character poems, but I also enjoy observations of the natural world, including the garden, poems about my life as a gay man, poems about growing up. While I mostly work in free verse, I sometimes work in forms. More recently, I’ve been working on flash fiction. Reading other poets, no matter what I’m working on, is helpful. I am particularly drawn to ancient Chinese poets: Du Fu, Li Bei, Wang Wei, among many others. I am a reviser. Sometimes I wish “first thought, best thought” would work for me, but when I draft, I have to almost “talk” the poem through, so much needless verbiage appears. I work toward a lean, economic line and poem. At 57, I am still learning how to trust the image, trust the metaphor or simile.
No book/chapbook fully represents who I am as a writer. Right now, I feel a strong connection with Ice And Gaywings, perhaps because it is most recent, but also because it combines my interest in Wisconsin, my relationship with Stan, and a connection with nature (particularly the Wisconsin Northwoods). Trina and the Sky took years to write. At first, I was going to write a suburban satire, a Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman done in poetry. I saw Trina as a comedic figure—until she got more real for me, a person with losses, doubts, and fears, and the poems moved away from my initial ideas. Characters always change, at least to some extent, as I write them.
AWS: As mentioned, your books use a wide variety of voices and styles. In Trina and the Sky, for example, my favorite of your books that I’ve read so far, you give one woman, Trina, a 3-D persona by letting her speak for herself in first person in some poems but by allowing a third-person narrator to speak for her in the majority of the poems. I want to note, too, how you very successfully avoid sentimentality even when the subject matter could lead us there. Trina, it seems to me, could be a woman inside many houses in America, and yet she is so entrenched in the details of her life that she can’t see beyond those details. What do you feel are the major themes, preoccupations, or concepts running through this particular book?
KP: Actually, Andrea, your comments say it very well, better than I could! I grew up in Villa Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. Trina could fit in there (if she “fits in” anywhere). Can any of us fully see beyond “the details” of our lives? I think Trina has a quiet courage and much of her life deals with various kinds of traps. I don’t think of Trina as an “everywoman” (or her husband Frank as an “everyman”). She’s a woman who faces difficulties partly due to lack of vital communication between herself, her two kids, and her husband. It’s almost like the bridges have washed out and she’s calling to them from an island.
AWS: You have succeeded in gaining an audience for your work through many different avenues and publishers. Your latest chapbook Ice and Gaywings won the qarrtsiluni chapbook contest in 2011, Glass Garden was published by WordTech Press in 2011, Trina and the Sky won the Main Street Rag chapbook contest and was published in 2009, and your chapbook Tiny Torn Maps was published with Deadly Chaps, a book that is available for immediate (and free) download through LuLu. Tell us about the choices you’ve made when considering contests, small presses, and self-publication. What you think of the publication market today and the opportunities and/or pitfalls for poets?
One challenge that many poets face is the “business” aspect of being a poet seeking publication. Much time goes into choosing a magazine which, one hopes, will be a good venue for one’s work. Over the years, I’ve grown a thick skin to rejection. I get a rejection and tear it into tiny pieces. Then I’m over it. One online site I use often is Duotrope. One could fall into Duotrope searching for possible magazines to submit to and never be seen again. Hours slip by. I’m pretty dogged. When I get work back, I always go over it and see what revisions could be helpful. That makes rejection more of an opportunity than a negative. William Stafford said that an editor is your friend if the editor prevents you from publishing work that shouldn’t be published.
A pitfall poets face is making the “goal” of publication more important than the growth of craft and the contemplative time that helps a poem to come alive. A funny thing about getting work accepted is that in poetry there is no arrival. There’s still a new idea, a new draft—and the work it takes to bring the poem to fruition. Winning contests is gratifying—and afterwards one goes back to a draft and sees how much more work is needed.
I am pleased that we have print and online journals. Both have much to offer. I like how online journals make poetry more accessible than the print world could do. How amazing to think that someone in India could be reading my poem because it is online. However, I love the feel and smell of a magazine that one can actually hold in one’s hands. A print journal feels warmer to me than something on a screen.
AWS: How has social media and new forms of communication and connection affected your life as a poet?
I’m thinking this through right now. I’m on Face Book and haven’t decided why it has become as much a part of my life as it has. It is great for connecting writers, though the connection often is in short “status update” snippets. I’m an email-aholic too. I find I check email quite often. I hardly ever write letters anymore. I have a friend who still has no computer, so I write him letters, but he is the exception.
AWS:You are a very productive poet, publishing no less than 20 chapbooks and four full collections to date. What is your writing regime? How do you manage (and balance) the administrative side of writing with the creative side?
KP: It’s fairly simple: butt in the chair. If I can’t generate something new, I try revising something old. In that way, I never have “writer’s block.” Some days are more productive than others, and I think with creativity one learns to respect the ebbs and flows. If I feel stuck, a prompt helps me. Sometimes I’ll sit down and look out the window and cull an image from what I see and start writing. Some of my poems have political content—those are often begun in instant fury over something on the news. Poems centered on a character can grow numerous once I get more of a handle on who the character is. Trina, for example, required many more Trina poems to be written than ever got published or published in the chapbook. They needed to be written for me to better understand her. I’m fairly bloodless about deleting work that doesn’t feel focused or my commitment to it is weak. Some drafts just don’t work and never will.
By administrative side, I think you mean making submissions. That’s pretty much about readiness. When I think the work is ready to be seen by an editor, I submit it. I am never sure when I send it out how “finished” it really is. With book manuscripts, if one comes home, that’s a great chance to see if some poems in the manuscript would better suit a different collection.
I’m a professor and when school is busy, my writing life suffers. In English and creative writing, the work is so language-centered that when I get home I can feel I lack the energy to create. I usually get better as the semester goes on, but in those early weeks my writing takes a hit
AWS: Following on from that question: When did you first start writing and why? And how has your poetry—and/or your approach to poetry—changed over the years?
KP: I can point to a day: July 4, 1970. In my family house in Villa Park, we had a ping pong table that my grandfather built himself in our basement. July is usually a hot month near Chicago and the basement was a cooler location. I loved (and still love) the popular music of the 60s. My favorite singer, then and now, is Tommy James (Tommy James and the Shondells). In 1969, Tommy had hits that were very “peace and love” on the radio (“Crystal Blue Persuasion,” “Sweet Cherry Wine,” “Ball Of Fire”). I decided to try writing my own song lyrics in this vein. My first “poem” was called “The Open Door” which included the immortal line: “C’mon, let’s unlock our minds.” The lyrics rhymed and had a chorus. As I kept writing, I got tired of always having to put in a chorus (ironic since I can’t read music or play an instrument). I started to get away from a tethering to rhyme. By the time a year had gone by, I had a sense that writing would be my life. I started reading other poets.
The excitement I felt when I started creating poems back when I was fifteen hasn’t faded at all. It’s still great fun—as well as a struggle. I didn’t write character poems early on. Those came later. I’m not sure why. That happened more when I got to graduate school. If one wants to write, one needs to do it, not just talk about it or say “Someday.” Distractions can be abundant and dangerous. If I’m not writing, I’m frustrated.
AWS: Do you belong to a writing community or group? If so, how has that helped you?
KP: I have at various times and they can be enormously useful. I have writing friends who sometimes share work. This past summer, for the microfiction chapbook, three writing friends, Margaret Robinson, James Esch, and Michael Cocchiarale, helped me choose which pieces to include. That was invaluable. Much of the writing life is solitary—but not all of it. Anytime someone raises a question, whether I choose to revise or not, is useful. Strange as it may sound, I include writers who are no longer living in my writing community. I have a picture in my home office of Du Fu—he’s watching me this very moment.
AWS: Do you regularly perform your poetry? How important is performing for you? What do you feel are the qualities of a successful poetry reading?
KP: I enjoy giving readings. I get butterflies before I begin but once I start I relax and give myself over to the experience. Listeners who listen carefully are helpful. One thing about “performance” I like in particular is the inclusion of voice and sound, not just the reading of poems with the eyes. Sound opens up many more dimensions than sight alone. Each poet has to find his or her own way to bring the work to those who listen. Early on, I was told “Don’t read so fast.” That was good advice. Eye contact helps. Monotone kills. Not all poets are great readers and reading styles change with time. I love Theodore Roethke’s poetry. When I heard him read on a CD I had to laugh—he sounded so purposefully “dramatic.” Yet that approach was probably well received sixty years ago.
AWS: How do you feel your role as an educator has affected your work? What advice do you give to students and/or aspiring poets?
KP: In my case, I think teaching turned out to be a great career choice. Academia can be a nightmare for some writers—or a wonderful place. Or somewhere in between. I teach more by discussion
than lecture, and in discussions students will further my own interest in a writer or an idea. Just last semester, I began class with a writing prompt, and I wrote as the students did. Now I have a dozen poems/flashes that grew out of that prompt. We have a small creative writing program at Widener. This allows teachers to work closely with students and to form a writing community. I love that kind of connection. Academia is not the right home for many writers. I think it was/is a good home for me.
My advice is more about hanging in there, finding ways to keep one’s creativity alive. Read. Talk with other writers. Write. And don’t worry about if it’s “good” or not, at least not right away. Play. Play with language. Ask yourself: do I love words? Find other poets who you are crazy about. I still remember when I was an undergraduate discovering “Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Or reading D.H. Lawrence’s Pansies the first time or Sylvia Plath’s poems. I felt my world breaking wide open.
AWS: This is a question that has always intrigued me (as the answer varies so much from poet to poet), and so I’d love to hear your own personal answer as a way of wrapping up this interview: Does poetry matter? Does it count for anything significant in a world where there seems to be few readers of poetry (and yet no shortage of writers)? What, if anything, does poetry do for writers, readers, and/or our world?
KP: Well, it matters to me and to those who cherish it. If a poem can change a person, a person’s perceptions, even in a small way, that can matter a great deal. And what does “matter”—the latest
Kardashian “news” flash? Who won what game? Poetry offers us a place for meditation and contemplation. When we share our ideas about a poem, we can better understand each other. If the readership for it is small, so be it. This isn’t the Neilson ratings. Even in our world of quick clicks and texts, many people want to write poems. Good poetry can deepen our emotional response and awaken us to ideas and observations we might otherwise miss. Speaking just for me, I feel incredibly lucky that I write. I’ve been doing it for 42 years now and, if I live to be 100, I hope I’m like Stanley Kunitz, writing practically up to the end.
AWS: Thank you, again, for your time, Ken. I’d love to end with an example of your work. Would you give us a poem that you feel represents your best and/or most interesting work to date?
KP: I don’t think I could choose that poem. Maybe someone else could. However, here’s a poem that might be a suitable ending.
AWS: I think this is a great choice for an ending. Once again, thank you. It’s been a pleasure learning more about you and your work.
PICKING FLOWERS IN A HURRICANE
Stay in, stay in,
weather people say. I look
at our messy dining room table,
a dull sky not quite able
to get in the window. Rain
intensifies. I take off my shirt,
grab the scissors, and dash
for the back yard. Heavy
gusts make zinnias sway. Gloriosa
daisies quickly surrender to
silver blades. Already closed,
a blue morning glory—
a boarded-up storefront. Down,
it comes down, a draping water.
I should be cold,
but it’s like running through
fever. With enough for
a decent bouquet, I sprint
for the door. Don’t run
with scissors, mom used to say.
Shoes soaked, I run, hard,
crush the blossoms
against my chest,
vase caskets ready.
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Click the mp3 link below to hear Brett Foster read his poem Love’s Casualties, from RHINO Poetry 2011.
Loves Casualties – Brett Foster.mp3
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Photo of Ayodele Heath by Bhisham Bherwani
M. Ayodele Heath is a graduate of the MFA program at New England College. Heath’s honors include a 2009 Dorothy Rosenberg Prize and a McEver Visiting Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech. He has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, Summer Poetry at Idyllwild, and the Caversham Centre for Writers & Artists in South Africa and received a grant in Literary Arts from the Atlanta Bureau for Cultural Affairs. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Crab Orchard Review, diode, Mississippi Review, Callaloo, The New York Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, and Mythium, as well as featured in anthologies including Poetry Slam: the Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (2000), Java Monkey Speaks Anthology I (2004), and My South: a People, a Place, a World All Its Own (2005). His book of poems, “Otherness” was published in 2011 by Brick Road Poetry Press.
His poem, “The Stuttering House Negro Diviner Speaks: Heath Plantation, 1863” appears in RHINO 2011 and you can hear him perform it here. Associate Editor Jacob Saenz interviewed M. Ayodele Heath in late April, 2011.
JS: First, congratulations on receiving an Editor’s Prize in RHINO 2011! It is truly an honor to publish and award such a great poem. Thank you for submitting it to us, which leads me to ask: what prompted you to submit to RHINO? How did you hear about us?
AH: First, let me say, thank you for believing in the poem, and thank you for the opportunity to showcase it.
I first heard about RHINO in Best American Poetry 2003, when Yusef Komunyakaa selected Susan Dickman’s poem, “Skin,” from RHINO 2002. I’ve been knocking on RHINO’s door ever since!
JS: I notice on your website (www.ayospeaks.com) you are listed as a performance poet w/numerous awards and honors to your name. As someone who appreciates performance/slam poetry, I am curious as to how you became involved w/slam poetry. Who are some of your influences?
AH: My first experience with a poetry slam was what I would call an eye-opening lesson in the human condition. In 1995 at a bar in Atlanta’s Buckhead now-defunct bar district, I advanced to the final round with another poet, who, before reading her final poem said to the audience, “I’m not sure what to read, so I’ll let you decide. I’m gonna read a poem about my pets. Do you wanna hear about my puppies? Or my p*ssy?” The audience went bananas, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how that story ends. But that poet taught me something very valuable about rule number one of public speaking: Know your audience.
My next significant experience with slam wouldn’t be for another 4 years at the 1999 Southeastern Regional Poetry Slam in Knoxville, TN. About 40 or so poets from around the Southeast competed in this 3-day competition and I found myself, again, in 2nd place going into the final round of the competition. This time, the opponent was Knoxville’s Daniel Roop. But this time, something very different happened. Daniel was ahead of me by about 2 full points, which is basically insurmountable in the final round of a slam competition. He took the microphone and proceeded to do a 5-minute long poem, purposefully taking about a 4- or 5-point time penalty. In other words, he threw the competition. Three days of competing and this stranger sabotaged himself so that I could win! I was speechless. In all my years growing up playing competitive sports, I’d never seen such selflessness. That gesture—that act—completely changed how I viewed the world of slam. It shifted my paradigm: I went from viewing performance as an act of receiving to an act of giving. And it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
My influences are endless. Here’s a short list: Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda, Jean Michel Basquiat, Patricia Smith, Ai, Allen Ginsberg, Ingrid de Kok, Lucille Clifton, Jean Paul Sartre, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Baudelaire, Gil Scott Heron, Charles Simic, Fela Kuti, Galway Kinnell, Q-Tip, Andre 3000, William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Lynn Nottage, William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes.
JS: How important is the oral versus the written in your poetry?
AH: To me, poetry, like theater or like music, is first and foremost a performance art. I start with the premise that the “poem” is a spiritual thing and that what appears in print is only a representation of that spiritual thing; the oral performance is another representation. Of the two, I see the oral poem as closer to the essence of what that spiritual thing is than the written poem.
That being said, I believe the oral poem and the written poem to be two different experiences with the oral as slightly more important because it is closer to the essence of the poem. I recognize that there are things which can be done on the page which are difficult to approximate in performance and that there are things which can be done in performance which are difficult to translate on the page. To try to make the oral and the written the same experience is to fail at both.
So, my job as a “performance” poet is to be as true to the written and the oral independently of each other – like a photograph of an object versus a video of an object. Each operates according to its own rules, its own physics, but each reaches toward its most accurate representation of that spiritual thing; each strives for its own fidelity.
When I think of my poetic lineage, I think of myself belonging to the ancient tradition of poets which predates a literate public – when the masses experienced poetry via the human voice: the epic poetry tradition of ancient Greece, the izibongo praise poetry of the Zulus, the griot tradition of West Africa. I generally believe that a poem is not a poem until it is read aloud (though there are exceptions.) I view the written word as technology that allows a different experience of the ‘spirit’ of a poem – technology no different than the internet or video. My objective is to use the technology most efficiently and most effectively, regardless of what it is.
JS: As a hip-hop fan, I love that your poem in RHINO, “The Stuttering House Negro Diviner Speaks: Heath Plantation, 1863,” contains many samples. In hearing the audio version, the samples clearly come through, especially with the great reading you give. I love how the poem starts out as a hymn and progresses into more of a hip-hop song. During the writing process, did you know you were going to use so many samples? Did one sample lead to another? Do the record companies know you sampled their work (ha!)?
AH:Thanks for recognizing the beginning as a hymn, because I’m not much of a singer!
I had no idea I was going to use so many samples. The poem was actually borne from a prompt at my first Cave Canem retreat last summer. Cave Canem is a week-long retreat at the University of Pittsburgh with African-American poets from all over the country. On the first night of the retreat, the 50-or-so attendees sit in a big circle and give a 2-3 minute introduction of ourselves, saying how we came into this space. There are generations of poets from age 18 to nearly age 80 expressing isolation and unity and in tears of joy and humility – it’s this incredibly moving experience.
After introductions, we were given a prompt that night to write a poem that night about why we were there. Alone in my room, I thought of the idea of the 
circle and what was being passed around that circle… and the wisdom entering that circle from the generations before… and the wisdom that would be carried from that circle for generations to come. And I sat down in front of my blank sheet of paper… and I thought of hip-hop cyphers… and drum circles… and records spinning… and atoms… and how all of this – this music, this pain, this struggle, this tradition of words – how this energy and data were being cycled around and around. And so I thought of a charge being passed around the circle. And my subconscious began humming a hymn from the old Baptist church of my childhood, “A Charge to Keep I Have.”
I had no idea where it was going, and no idea how many samples I would use… but my eyes got wet. I was moved by the earlier experience of that night… and I was frustrated because here I had this concept for a poem, but I had no idea how to get it on the paper. So, then I found myself crying tears of wonderment and frustration… and I stared at the screen… and I remembered where I was… in space and in time… and of all the supportive energy I’d felt in that circle… and I decided to just go with it. Cave Canem is such a safe space for a Black poet – where you don’t feel the need to footnote your experience and explain your cultural references, where you feel a freedom to just be your self.… and I just let the poem go.
It was like a kite I was chasing across a hill in a windstorm… The samples just led from one into another. And then the interruptions in my process gave me the idea to incorporate scratching… and then stuttering as a performance device. The first draft finished itself about 3 or 4 in the morning, and one of the first times since I was a child, I, Mr. Logic and Reason, had allowed sound to overtake sense – had allowed myself to write something that I didn’t even fully understand.
And no, the record companies don’t know that I sampled their work. But maybe they need to know. I could use the publicity!
JS: Who are you reading lately? Any writers that get you excited about the future of poetry?
AH: A lot of writers have me excited about the future of poetry. I’ve recently read Terrence Hayes’ ‘Lighthead, ’ Suheir Hammad’s ‘Breaking Poems,’ Douglas Kearney’s ‘The Black Automaton,’ Adrian Matejka’s ‘Mixology,’ and Christian Campbell’s ‘Running the Dusk.’ I’m looking forward to Rupert Fike’s upcoming debut, ‘Lotus Buffet.’
JS: What are you working on now? Any projects?
AH: Currently, I’m busy promoting my recently-released debut poetry collection, Otherness (Brick Road Poetry Press). And recently, I completed a video project called ‘Poets Make Black History,’ directed by Reggie Simpson, where I performed 28 poems by African-American poets for Black History month.
JS: Finally, do you have any advice for other poets submitting their work, whether to RHINO or elsewhere?
1) Read, read, read.
2) Write, write, write.
3) Never give up.
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Open Mike 6:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Featured Poets 6:45 pm – 7:30 pm
Brothers K
500 Main St.
Evanston, IL
Cecilia Pinto‘s work has appeared in various journals and magazines including RHINO, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Diagram, The Seneca Review, Quarter After Eight and is anthologized elsewhere.
Matt Barton is a founding member of the Waiting 4 the Bus Poetry Collective, a collaboration of Chicago poets and performers, as well as one of the principal collaborators of the poetry journal Exact Change Only. A book artist, Matt designs and publishes a handful of chapbooks featuring the work of several Chicago poets (including his own) under his imprint, Naked Mannekin. When not crawling through the brambles, Matt Barton is a land title attorney, doing stuff that would bore you to tears.
This project has been partially supported by grants from Poets & Writers
and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
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COME AND TRY OUT YOUR NEW WORK ON US!
Evanston Public Library
Church & Orrington
map
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.
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Donna Vorreyer’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, both online and in print, including Rhino, Cider Press Review, Weave, New York Quarterly, and qarrtsiluni. Her work has been nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net awards, and her chapbooks include Womb/Seed/Fruit (2010), Come Out, Virginia (2011), and Ordering the Hours (forthcoming). She lives in the Chicago area and spends her days teaching middle school, trying to convince teenagers that words matter. Her blog Put Words Together; Make Meaning offers weekly prompts for writers and commentary on the writing life.
Topic: If It’s Good Enough for Keats and Dante…Ekphrastic Poetry
Poets have long been champions of the visual image, and using visual art as inspiration (whether direct or indirect) can lead to work that creates a new narrative from someone else’s vision. We will discuss some examples of both classic and contemporary ekphrastic poems and then try some exercises based on visual images, both familiar and new.
Bring 17 or more copies (2 page limit) of a poem you want critiqued.*$5 -$10 donation appreciated.
This project has been partially supported by grants from Poets & Writers and the Illinois Arts Council.
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Click the mp3 link below to hear Lisa Fay Coutley read her poem Listen, from RHINO Poetry 2011.
Lisa Fay Coutley_Listen for RHINO.mp3
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