LOUISVILLE, KY. (March 11, 2015) Award-winning Kentucky author Crystal Wilkinson will lead a community workshop for local creative writers sponsored by Spalding University’s low-residency MFA in Writing program. The 8-day, non-credit writing workshop runs May 23-30, during the MFA program’s spring residency. Students are invited to attend all residency events, including lectures and panel discussions normally reserved exclusively for MFA students.
“There are so many good writers who may be curious about what an MFA program offers,” Wilkinson said. “This is an excellent way for members of the community to get a sample of how the program works. I am delighted to be teaching this workshop.”
Writers interested in attending the community workshop should email a 5- to 7-page writing sample in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, writing for children and young adults, playwriting, or screenwriting to mfa@spalding.edu. The workshop is limited to 12 students. Applicants receive a $150 discount off the full price of $800 if they apply by April 13. All applications are due by April 22.
Wilkinson is the author of Blackberries, Blackberries, winner of the 2002 Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, and Water Street, a finalist for both the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Both books were originally published by the Toby Press. She is also the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. She teaches fiction in Spalding’s low-residency MFA in Writing program and is Appalachian Writer in Residence at Berea College.
For more information, email mfa@spalding.edu or call 502-873-4399.
Up next on Two Poets: A review of Jae Newman's new collection of poems, Collage of Seoul.
Two Poets: An Open Conversation
Welcome to new contributor Angela Elles, who joins Jill Koren and Matthew Vetter for dialogue about poetry, events in the community, interviews, book reviews and more. Lend your voice to the discussion.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Body of Work: Three Poems from Trimble Co. Workshop
Here are three poems from the most recent workshop at Trimble County Library Workshop. There's one more workshop coming up this Friday, June 27th at Village Lights Bookstore at 6pm, followed by the regular Open Mic at 7pm.
Enjoy!
Musical Hands
Crack Pop
Fireworks in my Fingers
Jubilant joints
Flexible, gripping
Bending and poking
Sharp arrows when Bent
Wrinkly and crinkly
Loud or silent, Never in Between
Integral but mostly unnoticed
-- Amanda, librarian
Pulmonary Embolus
The thorax chest
lung that holds life's Breath
the heart that gives life's Blood
The bronchi that lead to
the road of exchange with
Blood & Air. Like a storm
the Blood Clot stops this
life exchange road,
blocks the tree of life.
Pulmonary Emboli
The Pain.
The Shortness of Air.
The threat that this PE
may break off and go else
where to Pain & death.
-- Denise, x-ray technician
Masks
They say that our eyes are
the windows to the soul
They tell stories
of sadness, despair, anger
Loss, happiness, failure, success.
There was a boy I once knew
whose eyes told me the story
of love, loneliness, and anger.
He was always sitting alone
during class-- no one liked him.
His classmates picked on him
Spread lies just to get him in trouble.
At home, Dad was always drunk
Mom was always beat
He was always crying himself to sleep
He wanted to kill himself
To just end all of the pain
But he couldn't because of
a girl he loved
In my opinion
He was just lost
We all wear masks,
everyone, everyday,
But sometimes we wear
them so much,
we forget who we really are.
--Anonymous, student
Enjoy!
Musical Hands
Crack Pop
Fireworks in my Fingers
Jubilant joints
Flexible, gripping
Bending and poking
Sharp arrows when Bent
Wrinkly and crinkly
Loud or silent, Never in Between
Integral but mostly unnoticed
-- Amanda, librarian
Pulmonary Embolus
The thorax chest
lung that holds life's Breath
the heart that gives life's Blood
The bronchi that lead to
the road of exchange with
Blood & Air. Like a storm
the Blood Clot stops this
life exchange road,
blocks the tree of life.
Pulmonary Emboli
The Pain.
The Shortness of Air.
The threat that this PE
may break off and go else
where to Pain & death.
-- Denise, x-ray technician
Masks
They say that our eyes are
the windows to the soul
They tell stories
of sadness, despair, anger
Loss, happiness, failure, success.
There was a boy I once knew
whose eyes told me the story
of love, loneliness, and anger.
He was always sitting alone
during class-- no one liked him.
His classmates picked on him
Spread lies just to get him in trouble.
At home, Dad was always drunk
Mom was always beat
He was always crying himself to sleep
He wanted to kill himself
To just end all of the pain
But he couldn't because of
a girl he loved
In my opinion
He was just lost
We all wear masks,
everyone, everyday,
But sometimes we wear
them so much,
we forget who we really are.
--Anonymous, student
Friday, August 23, 2013
A Poet's Pace: Greg Pape's Four Swans Reviewed by Angela Elles
From my
first meeting with Greg Pape, it was obvious to me that this man does not get
into a hurry. He is one of those rare humans who listens intentionally, not
just waiting for his turn to talk. Greg has been an official mentor to me as
part of my work in Spalding University’s Master of Fine Art program. As a
teacher and as an artist, Greg is an active listener and the poems in his new
book, Four Swans, give attention to the
details that often get lost when we push ahead, out of synch with the earth’s
rhythms. This latest collection is, in part, a meditation on the messages Greg
interprets for us, as he moves through time at a poet’s pace.
The
four-part book moves through each of the seasons, beginning in winter, and
ending in fall. The details and
correlations of each season are subtly woven in with observations small things
with great significance. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm here, where
mountains can “float” in the eyes of a child and God is both “great” and
“small.”
The tone
of reverence for great and small is set with the title poem, “Four Swans.” The
speaker is observing swans in January. Once he establishes the image, he goes
to the trouble of naming them:
January. Four white tundra swans
stand at the edge of the ice.
Grace. Peace. Dignity. X. (5-7).
To name
something is a way to show recognition, love, and maybe even guardianship. The importance
of the loving attention inherent in the act of naming resonates throughout the
book. Greg uses specific names for places, people and things that star in his
poems: His mother, Irene; his poetic ancestor, Su Tung-p’o; his departed
rooster, Big Red; and the river, the Bitterroot. They are all named along with
the swans out of reverence for their importance.
The
remainder of the poem, “Four Swans,” moves between observation of the swans and
memory or reflection on serious “real-life” circumstances: The hospitalization
of a mother, the tragic consequences of reckless behavior. In many ways the
movement of this poem mirrors the movement of the book. The poems often begin
in observation of the natural world, and the speaker points to how the human
world intersects with nature or how the struggles of nature parallel human
suffering. Often this intersection reveals something about how humans grapple
with reconciling the cycles of modern life with the cycles of this planet.
These
poems seem to be the product of Greg’s “listening” to the silent: animals, the
rivers, valleys, rocks and water. In
“Rain on the River he interprets a message from the river:
forming pockets, temporary cover,
holding water for trout. Water says
everything’s temporary, everything’s
moving,
trees, gravel bars, the new house
where the roofer kneels, nailing
shingles,
in light rain. Look, water says,
right now, before and after –
raindrops falling into clouds on the
sunlit river.
Greg
listens as if channeling these voices confirms that all matter surrounding us
is significant and holds a clue to the meaning of our existence if we are able put
our finger on the pulse of what is around us.
By the section
II of Four Swans, Greg establishes
the Bitterroot River of Montana as a key image, emblematic of the natural world.
In the poem “The Spell of the Bitterroot,”
human management of the river muddies the scene:
in many places. Portages abound,
and no-trespassing signs hang from
strands
of barb-wire strung across braids.
This is not right.
But does the river care? It just
wants
to meander, take its own sweet time,
trust in gravity and the tidal pull
of eventual dissolution
in the great peace-making sea.
(6-14)
It is
interesting that although the speaker is offended, he focuses on the wants of
the river. Like the water in “Rain on the River,” Greg gives voice and certain
wisdom to the force of the river; this helps the audience to see rivers in a
fresh light. The poem ends emphasizing that perspective:
channels, braids, a continuous flow
of wild water. Just as we do,
our river wants to stretch out
and move freely in its own bed. (41-44)
By
acknowledging the intention of the river, Greg allows us understand how our own
intentions can be in tune with nature, if we stop to notice the similarities.
The
similarities are sometimes small and overlooked by moving through time too
quickly. Just as the river will make and “take its own sweet time,” we too must
move slower to receive the messages that delight and enlighten us.
As I
read this collection, I found myself holding back, not reading too many poems in
one sitting. I wanted to savor these poems; I didn’t want to rush through them.
This is the effect of poetry that enlightens its reader by minding particular
details that enrich the experience of being alive.
To be
present in the days’ miracles, Greg finds that it is essential to operate
within the natural tempo of our earth; Greg listens to the earth’s messages,
and he shows us what we are missing if we forge ahead too quickly.
ISBN
978-088924-127-2
How to
order: From the publisher:
Angela
Elles is a resident of Madison, Indiana. A mom, wife, teacher, and student,
Angela teaches at Ivy Tech Community College and is pursuing an MFA in Poetry
at Spalding University.
Monday, August 5, 2013
The Previous Exercise: So, How'd It Go?
A few posts back, I posted an exercise as a challenge (see June 7, 2013). As a teacher I always try to do my own assignments, so I thought I would post a sample of my exercise and encourage readers to do the same. It is rough; I have done only minimal editing. So here it is. And please, post your own.
Riding the bike through the first neighborhood, I disappear into another world. The houses are lit up from the inside and the outside, a stage set, like Disney World or Santa Land. I am biking by them but I am apart, part of another world yet. Deep. And cold. The dips in the road hold a cooler air. I am breathing in the night, lit by the moon or by my Cat Eye bike light. My mother is afraid. She does not like for me to bike at night. My grandfather used to offer to give me a ride (the quarter of a mile home to my own house). He is dead now. I am alive. Alive in the night. The world holds me. I am torn: which way to go? Down Hatcher? The road is bumpy, crumbling, enacting Earth’s repo plan. Besides, Hatcher takes me down past St. Joseph’s cemetery, the one where my great uncle used to let the kids loose and disappear. At night. Or the Heritage Trail? Smoother, but still a cemetery. I cannot take the middle way—Hanging Rock—the police officer chastised me last time (after he handed me my fallen bananas). I decide on Heritage, put my left arm out to signal. Sirens tell me that there is an officer racing down Hanging Rock. Good thing I didn’t go that way. Passing the valley of the white wooden crosses, I hear what at first I think must be another siren. Soon I realize it is not a siren, but coyotes. Their cries could be mistaken for neighborhood dogs, almost, but they tangle and wind the way domestication would not. A shiver runs through my body that has nothing to do with cold. I pedal harder. Around the next curve is a deer. This time I do not jump (as I did last week, knocking the tail light from my seat post as the deer fled, white tails raised in alarm). No, this time, neither of us flinches. The doe watches me glide by. I watch her. We see each other we are alive at the same time I turn descend the pavement tilts the bike and me with it IdonotrunofftheroadIaccelerateIamcoldIamcolderIamalive.
Biking At Night
Riding the bike through the first neighborhood, I disappear into another world. The houses are lit up from the inside and the outside, a stage set, like Disney World or Santa Land. I am biking by them but I am apart, part of another world yet. Deep. And cold. The dips in the road hold a cooler air. I am breathing in the night, lit by the moon or by my Cat Eye bike light. My mother is afraid. She does not like for me to bike at night. My grandfather used to offer to give me a ride (the quarter of a mile home to my own house). He is dead now. I am alive. Alive in the night. The world holds me. I am torn: which way to go? Down Hatcher? The road is bumpy, crumbling, enacting Earth’s repo plan. Besides, Hatcher takes me down past St. Joseph’s cemetery, the one where my great uncle used to let the kids loose and disappear. At night. Or the Heritage Trail? Smoother, but still a cemetery. I cannot take the middle way—Hanging Rock—the police officer chastised me last time (after he handed me my fallen bananas). I decide on Heritage, put my left arm out to signal. Sirens tell me that there is an officer racing down Hanging Rock. Good thing I didn’t go that way. Passing the valley of the white wooden crosses, I hear what at first I think must be another siren. Soon I realize it is not a siren, but coyotes. Their cries could be mistaken for neighborhood dogs, almost, but they tangle and wind the way domestication would not. A shiver runs through my body that has nothing to do with cold. I pedal harder. Around the next curve is a deer. This time I do not jump (as I did last week, knocking the tail light from my seat post as the deer fled, white tails raised in alarm). No, this time, neither of us flinches. The doe watches me glide by. I watch her. We see each other we are alive at the same time I turn descend the pavement tilts the bike and me with it IdonotrunofftheroadIaccelerateIamcoldIamcolderIamalive.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: An Example for How to Use Persona Poems to Write about History and Current Events
I live
on the Ohio River, and outside my bedroom window I have been watching the
construction of a new bridge. It is the only bridge on this part of the river
for roughly 40 miles, so it is significant in many ways to my community. The
importance of this new bridge, as well as the old one, has inspired numerous
poems lately, and I hope to compile them into a chapbook.
I have
mostly explored the bridge from the first person point of view, and all the
poems are rooted in my personal experience. I have some familial ties to the
history of the old bridge, currently being demolished, and I have personal ties
to individuals working on the new bridge. As I dive deeper into this project, I
have considered using the persona poem to add depth and complexity to this subject.
Gabrielle
Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia
Earhart recently inspired me. In particular, in her cycle of persona poems
surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Calvocoressi is able to use
unique, historical perspectives to explore universal themes. In poem V. of the “Amelia Earhart” cycle,
“Doris Luman, housewife,” a witness poem becomes a meditation on loss from the
perspective of a wife and mother. The speaker is responding to the news of
Earhart’s disappearance and nonchalantly discusses loss as an everyday
occurrence. One immediately thinks of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” wherein the
poet claims loss is not a disaster, although it may seem to be at times. The first line of Calvocoressi’s poem is
similar:
It’s easy to lose someone. Last
week, walking my son to school,
I turned away for a second.
The next thing I know he’s in the street.
(1-4).
In this poem, the housewife is clearly more
concerned with what is happening in her domestic sphere than with public
figures. Choosing the housewife as one
of the personas allows Calvocoressi to take the exploration of loss to an
unexpected place: the home. The ultimate human notion of safety revolves around
the home, and the speaker in this poem is turning that notion on its head. The
poem moves inward, and the meditation on loss dives into the themes of safety
and permanence:
You can lose a person at home
In the safest possible place,
a place you could walk blindfolded.
that’s why I wasn’t surprised
when that woman got lost. (12-16)
The
speaker refers to Earhart as “that woman,” a telling detail in the speaker’s
reaction to the news of Earhart’s disappearance. Tragedies happen in the sky
and they happen inside the home, and it is not the magnitude of the setting
that dictates the severity of its effects the human mind.
These poems lend a personal context to the
events surrounding a celebrity. By using different personas to look at
Earhart’s disappearance, Calvocoressi allows room for truths to emerge that
speak to the human condition and go well beyond the historical event. If the
poet had only allowed her own reactions to Earhart’s story to be the subject of
these poems, they would be missing the depth and diversity of human experience
that gives these poems their universal appeal.
I hope
that my bridge poems can explore my particular experience with a highly public
happening while achieving some kind of balance with those themes on a universal
level. Reading Calvocoressi’s persona poems, I was moved to reach deeper into
my speakers’ dreams, memories and, sometimes, darkest thoughts. Diving into the
subconscious via the persona poems in the style of Calvocoressi seems like a promising
avenue to take my “bridge poems” to the next level.
Angela Elles is
a resident of Madison, Indiana. A mom, wife, teacher, and student, Angela
teaches at Ivy Tech Community College and is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at
Spalding University.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Claire Everett's New Tanka Collection, Reviewed by Haiku Guru Barry George
twelve moons
by Claire Everett Introduction by David Terelinck.
Perfect bound; 76 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4781539-5-5.
$14.75 US. Available at https://www.createspace.com/3923071.
What is
distinctive about Claire Everett's twelve
moons is that her tanka do not merely juxtapose the natural and personal
worlds; they interfuse the two.
passing sun
what of me is flame
taking hold
and what of me is timeless
like this rock, briefly warm?
The poet
compares herself directly to the images of nature; she is the sun's flame and the rock. The metaphor is woven into all
five lines of the tanka. Indeed, a transmutation is at work, as the following makes
explicit:
transformed
by the breath of your love
I am no longer sand
scattered to the wind
but the beauty of blown glass
In other
cases, the interconnection between the poet and nature involves several images.
and when my thoughts
have followed the rosewood grain
of sunset
swirling dark from the eaves
pipistrelles
Thoughts
that become one with the texture of the fading sky, and then begin to focus on a
darker motion around the eves, suddenly take shape - as bats.
Or, in
the poet's contemplation, prompted by a similarity in shape, one image might
morph into an entirely different one.
by candlelight
watching incense twist and curl
as shadow
the double helix uncoils,
the illness passed down the line
Closely
allied with this interfusion of thought and images is the the intermingling of
senses, or synesthesia, which Everett sometimes employs.
in silence
deeper than the scent
of pine
we listen
for the eyes of the deer
Here
sound, smell, and silence work both as separate senses and as aspects of one
combined perception.
As the
title suggests, twelve moons, is
organized seasonally. Each individual tanka takes on added resonance as it is
grouped under one of the traditional names for the twelve full moons. The range
of subjects includes motherhood, marriage, love, discord,
disappointment, injury, illness, and mourning. Time is a persistent theme.
son of mine
what's done is done...
seed by seed, I'd breathe
back the dandelion clock,
place its stem in your hand
The
foregoing poem also exemplifies the tension Everett achieves with the sounds,
rhythms, and pacing of words. So too does this one:
no greater peace
than the deep green
silence of the trees
when the breeze
has moved on
Note the
long "e" sounds in every line but the last one - when the (long-e)
breeze has moved on - as well as the way changes of pace and even syncopation
are used to advantage.
This is
a collection to be savored as much for the richness of its imagery as for its
finely crafted form. For all the intricacy implicit in their design, the tanka
in twelve moons remind us that the
best poetry often seems disarmingly and marvelously simple.
after our walk
with such tenderness
you brushed
the clouds
out of my hair
Barry George’s haiku and tanka have been published in leading journals and anthologies.
His essay, "Shiki the Tanka Poet," appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, and poems from Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives and teaches in
Philadelphia.
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