A Gathering of Poets, April 9, Community Arts Cafe in Winston-Salem. This looks like a poetry event not to be missed. 4 workshops with people like Fred Chappell, Kay Byer, Debra Kaufman and Joseph Mills! Here is the link: http://www.press53.com/GatheringofPoets2011.html
SATURDAY, APRIL 9, 8 AM - 6 PM
SPECIAL OPEN MIC EVENING, 7:30-9:30 PM, FEATURING A CAPPELLA POETRY BY FLEUR-DE-LISA
Held at The Community Arts Café, Fourth & Spruce, Winston-Salem, NC
SCHEDULE AND WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
Check-in & Continental Breakfast: 8 - 9 a.m.
First Morning Workshop Block: 9 - 10:15 a.m.
These workshops will be offered again during the First Afternoon Workshop Block: 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.
Debra Kaufman: Polishing the Lines (Limited to 30 poets)
We write poetry to discover something about ourselves and our world, and to share what we learn with readers. We will look closely at how to strengthen our poems by focusing on the ways precise imagery and musicality in our lines reveal a poem’s intended meaning. We will explore ways to refine our images and enhance our musical
phrasing to better reveal to ourselves and our readers the deeper truths inside our poems. Please bring a poem you would like to work on.
Alex Grant: Compression in Poetry (Limited to 30 poets)
This workshop focuses on practical, tangible methods and techniques to help you strip down and polish your poems. We will focus on specifics, before reading and discussing poems which exemplify this approach, then working on your own poems. Participants will take away practical, understandable methods they can immediately
apply to both new poems and work under revision.
Joseph Mills: What’s in a Name? (Limited to 30 Poets)
Margaret Mitchell considered naming her story Tomorrow Is Another Day and Tote the Weary Load. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested Under the Red White and Blue and The High Bouncing Lover to his publisher. None of these phrases has entered popular culture; instead we have Gone with the Wind and The Great Gatsby. Titles are not simply handy ways to catalogue works; they can be crucial elements. Without the title “Station in a Metro,” the reader would have little idea what Ezra Pound’s poem was about. In this workshop, we’ll consider the importance of a variety of titles from books, paintings, poems, and songs, and we’ll explore ways to develop intriguing, effective titles for our own work.
Terri Kirby Erickson: Marketing Yourself and Your Work (Limited to 30 Poets)
Google "Terri Kirby Erickson" and you will find her everywhere, from her personal blog, to online lit mags and book blogs. In 2010, her poetry collection, Telling Tales of Dusk, reached #23 on the Poetry Foundation's list of Contemporary Best Sellers thanks to the endorsement of nationally syndicated columnist Sharon Randall in her column entitled, “Best Reads.” No matter where you are in your writing process, it’s never too early to start selling yourself and your work. The difference between being an unknown poet and a widely read poet is effective
marketing. In this workshop, we’ll examine various methods and strategies to get you and your poetry noticed by readers, editors and publishers.
Second Morning Workshop Block: 10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
These workshops will be offered again during the Second Afternoon Workshop Block: 3:00 - 4:15 p.m.
Fred Chappell: Master Workshop (Limited to 30 Poets)
Kathryn Stripling Byer: Studio-style Master Class (Limited to 50 Poets)
In this studio-style master class, former North Carolina Poet Laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer will select poems written by four poets in attendance to read and discuss in a studio-style forum with the four selected poets and then everyone in attendance. Attendees may submit one poem for consideration no later than March 15. Ms. Byer will select four poems for discussion, to be announced at the beginning of the master class.
Valerie Nieman: Every Picture Tells a Poem (Limited to 30 Poets)
Ekphrasis is a marriage of imaginations, that of the visual artist and the writer. In this poetry workshop, Valerie Nieman will discuss noted works, such as poems by Rilke, Auden, and Fred Chappell, and will take advantage of the Community Arts Café’s Gallery of the Arts to lead writing exercises using contemporary art as the source for new poems.
Other Important Times and Events
Lunch Break: 11:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. (Buffet lunch provided)
Faculty Reading With Special Guest Poet Isabel Zuber: 4:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Closing Remarks: 5:30 - 6 p.m.
Dinner on Your Own: 6-7:30 p.m.
Open Mic Reading with A Cappella Poetry by Fleur-de-Lisa: 7:30 - 9:30 p.m.
($5 cover, Free to Gathering of Poets Attendees.) Poets wishing to read must place his or her name in a bowl. Readers will be determined by a drawing at two different times during the evening. If the poet called is not present, another name will be drawn. Sixteen poets will be selected to read during this event. Each poet will have three minutes to read, and this will be strictly enforced to be fair to all poets.
Registration:
To register, visit the registration page.
Check box to select your desired workshops.
If workshop is full, you may check the "waitlist" box and you will be placed on the waitlist in the order you signed up.
Waitlists will be cleared if space becomes available.
Press 53 reserves the right to make last-minute changes due to cancelations by faculty. If a cancelation by faculty occurs, we will do our best to replace the workshop with an equally beneficial workshop, but no guarantees can be made.
To Register, click here.
Questions can be emailed to Kevin Watson at kevin@press53.com or by calling Kevin at 336-414-5599.
Showing posts with label Terri Kirby Erickson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terri Kirby Erickson. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Friday, November 13, 2009
Review of Terry Kirby Erickson's "Telling Tales of Dusk"
Review (First Published in Wild Goose Poetry Review)
Telling Tales of Dusk
by Terri Kirby Erickson
Press 53 (2009) 107 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 9780982441633, Poetry
What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In the poetry of Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems “County Fair,” “Star Lite Motel,” “Betty’s Roadside Diner,” and “Saving Grace,” respectively.
And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how “Queen Anne’s lace dandies up a ditch” (“Queen Anne’s Lace”), in how an old woman’s moaning is like the wind “when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks,” (“Assisted Living”) searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity.
The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in “The Speckled Trout Café,” the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife “the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds” in “Papa Never Learned to Read,” and the blues guitarist in “Delta Blues” who, the speaker comments, “should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but” instead lifts “it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen.”
These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In “Smoke and Mirrors,” for example, Erickson doesn’t spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: “The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you.” Similarly, in “Daisy Chain,” she presents the image of four little girls “daisy chained” to their mother to illustrate “belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement.”
Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken together, they are subtly effective, quietly teaching the reader to reach deeper into the everyday image to recognize and value significance. In other words, they lull you into such comfort that when you finally begin to cry while reading “Blue Hydrangeas,” you realize the poems have taught you the empathy needed to feel this deeply for someone you’ve never known and that you’re not crying just for the speaker of this poem, who reminds us that as long as we are able to love anything our capacity to love ourselves remains, but for all the speakers of all the poems and the wonderfully vital world in which they live, the same world you realize in which you live.
Telling Tales of Dusk
by Terri Kirby Erickson
Press 53 (2009) 107 pages, $12.00
ISBN: 9780982441633, Poetry
What do a Ferris wheel, a motel sign, a roadside diner, and a bay window have in common? In the poetry of Terri Kirby Erickson, they are all sources of light, literal means and transformative symbols of salvation in the poems “County Fair,” “Star Lite Motel,” “Betty’s Roadside Diner,” and “Saving Grace,” respectively.
And perhaps salvation is what poetry is all about, redeeming the finer details of life by imbuing them with the value of memory, finding meaning in what we might otherwise all too easily deem meaningless. As Williams helped us realize just how much did depend upon a red wheelbarrow, Erickson finds meaning in how “Queen Anne’s lace dandies up a ditch” (“Queen Anne’s Lace”), in how an old woman’s moaning is like the wind “when it whips / around a house, rattling windows, / searching for cracks,” (“Assisted Living”) searching, in other words, for ways in, much the same way this woman searches for her way into another world, one of peace, reunion, and clarity.
The speaker of that poem in her unforgettable search for what is inexplicably missing from her world is only the first of a number of remarkable portraits gathered in this collection. There is also the lonely man in “The Speckled Trout Café,” the illiterate preacher who builds his sermons on the scripture read to him by his less faithful wife “the words warmed / by her breath and scattered into his / brain like dandelion seeds” in “Papa Never Learned to Read,” and the blues guitarist in “Delta Blues” who, the speaker comments, “should roll a stone / over hurt that deep, but” instead lifts “it up like Lazarus for anybody / lucky enough to listen.”
These portraits and simple symbols of salvation add up to a memorable second collection of work on their own, but the reader should be careful not to be fooled by the apparent simplicity of these poems, for just as still waters run deepest, the greatest revelations are often expressed in the fewest words. I, for one, am a fan of understatement, something often achieved in poetry through the metaphysical, poems which, as Dickinson encouraged, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In “Smoke and Mirrors,” for example, Erickson doesn’t spell out her warning of how a teleological obsession with the prize indiscriminately dissolves all else from our focus, good and bad, superfluous and necessary. Instead she shows only how the call of a longed-for boy affects the perception of a young girl: “The boy / I was talking to dissolved, tablet-like, / in the watered down scenery of the things / that were not you.” Similarly, in “Daisy Chain,” she presents the image of four little girls “daisy chained” to their mother to illustrate “belonging so / palpable, it beat like heart / on the pavement.”
Just as these poems are satisfying in their surface-level imagery but tricky in their larger or deeper implications, so too is the book as a whole. There are plenty of poems that seem trivial, merely descriptive, but taken together, they are subtly effective, quietly teaching the reader to reach deeper into the everyday image to recognize and value significance. In other words, they lull you into such comfort that when you finally begin to cry while reading “Blue Hydrangeas,” you realize the poems have taught you the empathy needed to feel this deeply for someone you’ve never known and that you’re not crying just for the speaker of this poem, who reminds us that as long as we are able to love anything our capacity to love ourselves remains, but for all the speakers of all the poems and the wonderfully vital world in which they live, the same world you realize in which you live.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Dead Mule Round-Up
DEAD MULE ROUND-UP
No, I haven’t lost my mind. There is not really going to be a round-up of farm animals, alive or dead, in Hickory, at least not in the sense you might be thinking.
“Dead Mule,” in the world of poets, is one of the best online literary journals in the country today, and I am particularly fond of it because it specializes in Southern literature. The Mule, as its friends call it, has published two of my chapbooks in the past two years and one of Tim Peeler’s (another Hickory poet) as well. It has also been the first journal to publish the works of 9 of my students at CVCC.
Officially the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, editors Val MacEwan and Helen Losse have decided to hold a reading by poets who have been published in the Mule, and they’ve decided to let Poetry Hickory host that reading. The reading will take place at 6:00 on Tuesday, August 4 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory, the same place most Poetry Hickory readings occur.
Currently 6 poets will be featured, although Losse expects that number to increase to 8 or 9 by August 4. The 6 readers already committed are an impressive group to say the least. In addition to myself, Losse, and Peeler, the reading will include Jessie Carty of Charlotte (editor of the journal “Shape of a Box” and author of “At the A & P Meridiem”), Felicia Mitchell of Virginia (author of “The Cleft of the Rock”) and Terri Kirby Erickson of Salisbury (author of “Thread Count” and “Telling Tales of Dusk”).
These six readers have written a combined total of 18 collections of poetry. Anytime you get that many poets with that much experience together in the same room, something spectacular is bound to happen. The readings are free and open to the public. For more information, call me at 828-234-4266 or email me at asowens1@yahoo.com.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
North Carolina Poetry Society Plays Vital Role
NORTH CAROLINA POETRY SOCIETY PLAYS VITAL ROLE
Recent Awards and Upcoming Events Include Area Poets
"Musings" for March 12, 2009
In one of my previous columns I featured information about one of the key poetry organizations in NC, the Poetry Council of North Carolina. Today I’m highlighting another of NC’s vital groups for the promotion of poetry, the North Carolina Poetry Society.
NCPS was created in 1932, making it the longest-active poetry organization I am aware of in the state. Since that time, the Society has served as an invaluable networking and development tool for poets across the state, bringing poets together at least three times a year for their annual meetings at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines. Those meetings are usually the third Saturdays of January, May, and September. The January meeting concluded recently and included workshops by NC writers Maureen Sherbondy, Richard Krawiec, and Barbara Presnell, as well as Open Mic readings and book signings.
The Poetry Society is in the news again locally with the selection of its 2009 Contest Winners. Each year, the Society sponsors awards in 9 adult and 5 student categories. Those winners are invited to read their work at the NCPS Awards Day, this year on May 16, at the Weymouth Center. Winners also have their work published in the annual awards anthology, Pinesong. Among the winners this year are several writers with local connections, including myself and fellow Hickory native, Bud Caywood. Other winners, including Bill Griffin and Terri Kirby Erickson, have made or will make appearances in Hickory through the Poetry Hickory reading series held the second Tuesday of each month at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse.
In addition to meetings and contests, the Poetry Society sponsors the annual Sam Ragan Poetry Festival, to be held this year at Weymouth on March 14 and highlighted by readings from poet Cathy Smith-Bowers. The Society also sponsors the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series, which brings together outstanding poetry instructors with promising young writers, culminating in a series of readings across the state, one of which will be at the Patrick Beaver Library in Hickory on March 29, featuring incoming NCPS President, Anthony Abbott and Hickory native, Liz Monish.
The Poetry Society also sponsors the Brockman-Campbell Book Award for the best book of poetry by a North Carolinian in the previous year, maintains an online calendar of poetry events across the state, and distributes a monthly newsletter called E-Muse online. The Society currently has in excess of 350 members. Those interested in more information can find it at the Society’s website at www.sleepycreek.org/poetry/.
Recent Awards and Upcoming Events Include Area Poets
"Musings" for March 12, 2009
In one of my previous columns I featured information about one of the key poetry organizations in NC, the Poetry Council of North Carolina. Today I’m highlighting another of NC’s vital groups for the promotion of poetry, the North Carolina Poetry Society.
NCPS was created in 1932, making it the longest-active poetry organization I am aware of in the state. Since that time, the Society has served as an invaluable networking and development tool for poets across the state, bringing poets together at least three times a year for their annual meetings at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines. Those meetings are usually the third Saturdays of January, May, and September. The January meeting concluded recently and included workshops by NC writers Maureen Sherbondy, Richard Krawiec, and Barbara Presnell, as well as Open Mic readings and book signings.
The Poetry Society is in the news again locally with the selection of its 2009 Contest Winners. Each year, the Society sponsors awards in 9 adult and 5 student categories. Those winners are invited to read their work at the NCPS Awards Day, this year on May 16, at the Weymouth Center. Winners also have their work published in the annual awards anthology, Pinesong. Among the winners this year are several writers with local connections, including myself and fellow Hickory native, Bud Caywood. Other winners, including Bill Griffin and Terri Kirby Erickson, have made or will make appearances in Hickory through the Poetry Hickory reading series held the second Tuesday of each month at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse.
In addition to meetings and contests, the Poetry Society sponsors the annual Sam Ragan Poetry Festival, to be held this year at Weymouth on March 14 and highlighted by readings from poet Cathy Smith-Bowers. The Society also sponsors the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poets Series, which brings together outstanding poetry instructors with promising young writers, culminating in a series of readings across the state, one of which will be at the Patrick Beaver Library in Hickory on March 29, featuring incoming NCPS President, Anthony Abbott and Hickory native, Liz Monish.
The Poetry Society also sponsors the Brockman-Campbell Book Award for the best book of poetry by a North Carolinian in the previous year, maintains an online calendar of poetry events across the state, and distributes a monthly newsletter called E-Muse online. The Society currently has in excess of 350 members. Those interested in more information can find it at the Society’s website at www.sleepycreek.org/poetry/.
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