Susan R. Williamson, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival (PBPF), today announced that the 13th annual festival is returning to Old School Square for six days, January 16-21, 2017. Special Guest Poet Palm will be Charles Simic, past United States Poet Laureate (2007-2008) and 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner.
Nine distinguished poets will lead poetry writing workshops at the Festival: David Baker, Tina Chang, Lynn Emanuel, Daisy Fried, Terrance Hayes, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Carl Phillips and Martha Rhodes, and individual conferences will be offered by nationally acclaimed poets: Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Nickole Brown and Ginger Murchison. Performances at the Field House will offer sizzling spoken word by The Mayhem Poets: Mason Granger and Scott Raven.
“The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is offering a nationally recognized, world-class learning opportunity with more than a dozen of America’s most engaging and award-winning poets in Delray Beach,” said Ms. Williamson. “In addition to our workshops, the Festival brings the voices of America’s most beloved living poets to the Crest Theatre stage. We work hard to present a diverse group of poetic voices, each expressing in their poems what we sometimes find inexpressible.”
Special Guest Poet
Charles Simic
Charles Simic is the author of numerous collections of poems, among them, The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The Lunatic, Master of Disguises; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; Classic Ballroom Dances, which won the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Award. A collection entitled Sixty Poems was released in honor of his appointment as US Poet Laureate. Simic has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano, and many translations of poets from former Yugoslavia as well as an anthology of Serbian poetry entitled The Horse Has Six Legs. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.
A poet, essayist, and translator, Simic also has been honored with the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
About his appointment to US Poet Laureate, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, “The range of Charles Simic’s imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor.”
And the Harvard Review raved, “There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures…Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse.”
Nine Workshops for Qualified Writers of Poetry
Workshops are limited to 12 qualified participants and three auditors to provide a meaningful level of discussion, and careful, informed attention to each participant’s work. Beginning poets, shy about sharing their poems, should consider auditing a workshop as a great way to learn by observing and listening.
* Poetry Inside Out with David Baker
Workshop attendees will work on their poems inside and out in hands-on, line-by-line discussions of at least three work-in-progress poems from each participant: a confessional or autobiographical poem; an erotic, social, collective or political poem; and a nature poem.
David Baker has published 14 books including his most recent poetry collection, Never-Ending Birds, winner of the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets, which was cosponsored by The Kenyon Review and gathers Baker’s KROnline interviews with some of America’s important poets. For his work, Baker has been awarded fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, Ohio Arts Council, Society of Midland Authors, and others. He currently serves as Professor of English at Denison University where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing. He also teaches in the low residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
* The Sensual Form with Tina Chang
This workshop is intended for writers who are interested in sensual detail (relating to or drawing from the five senses) with the understanding that poetry cannot exist without spirit, soul, shadow, duende, intuition. The first half of the class will focus on traditional forms such as the sonnet, ghazal, pantoum, while the second half concentrate on modernized and invented forms (the contemporary zuihitsu, erasure, and hybrid forms combining poetry and visual art). Workshop discussions will explore poetic devices, formal strategies, structure, rhythm, and sound.
Tina Chang is the first female to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and is the author of the collections of poetry Of Gods & Strangers and Half-Lit Houses. She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Van Lier Foundation among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and she is also a member of the international writing faculty at the City University of Hong Kong.
* Obsessional Poetics: No One Writes Just One Poem with Lynn Emanuel
This workshop will focus on clusters of poems, examining the ways, consciously or not, poems return to a place, person, image, word, line/sentence construction, or a form of expression. What can these repetitions teach about poems? How to mine these repetitions, these obsessions, for new work? How to subvert or delve more deeply into writing habits? Rather than looking at numerous single poems each meeting, this workshop will look at a fewer number of poem clusters and spend a longer period of time on each.
Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly—, Noose and Hook, and most recently, The Nerve of It: New and Selected Poems. Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry and is anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has served as a poetry editor for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, on the Literature Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, and as a judge for the National Book Awards. Emmanuel has received numerous awards including the Eric Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a fellowship from the Ranieri Foundation and the National Poetry Series. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bennington Writers’ Conference, The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and has been the Elliston Distinguished Poet-in-Residence in the PhD program at University of Cincinnati. She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh where she founded and directs the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series.
* Writing Poems that Don’t Fit with Daisy Fried
The best poetry often doesn’t fit into any stylistic mode, and uses what techniques it needs as it finds them. This workshop will explore existing poems with supportive frankness. Participants will generate new work that will be submitted to daily “kamikaze” revision techniques, and read relevant work by modern and contemporary poets.
Daisy Fried is the author of three books of poetry: Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, named by Library Journal one of the five best poetry books of 2013; My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she’s received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Recent poems have been published in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2013. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times, Poetry and the Threepenny Review, and won the Editors Award from Poetry for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” an essay about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
* New Shadows: Reading to Write with Terrance Hayes
This workshop will offer concrete strategies for writing when the only teacher available is a book. It will explore the ways “reading to write” can result in new poems. Participants will look at how an assortment of poems “shadow,” imitate, and are in conversation with other poems and other forms (music, film, journalism). Most importantly, inventive imitations and transformations will be generated in response to the reading. Poems will be discussed not for their merit as imitations, but for their originality and potential.
A 2014 MacArthur Fellow, Terrance Hayes is the author of How To Be Drawn, a collection of poems that was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His first book, Muscular Music won both a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second book, Hip Logic, was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box was a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist and was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. Hayes’ other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a profile in The New York Times Magazine. After teaching for 12 years at Carnegie Mellon University, he is now a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
* The Poet’s Craft: Using What’s at Hand with Dorianne Laux
This primarily generative workshop will use selected poems by this year’s festival faculty and special guest poet as inspiration, models, and guides for writing. This workshop will look closely at each poem to divine craft elements such as structure and strategy, diction and rhythm, sound and pattern, subject and style.
Dorianne Laux is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award, and The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. The recipient of many national grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Laux lives in Raleigh, where she teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. She is also founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.
* Word by Word, Line By Line with Thomas Lux
This workshop will pay close attention, in minute detail, to all the elements that go into writing a poem. Robert Frost said that the primary way to get to the reader’s heart and mind is through the reader’s ear. The sound, the noise of a poem, demands attention. Workshop participants must be tough, honest and direct with each other’s work and also be generous, thoughtful and never condescending or dismissive. A good workshop can do both.
Thomas Lux is Bourne Professor of Poetry at The Georgia Institute of Technology. He directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program and Poetry@Tech. He has published over a dozen books of poetry; his most recent is Selected Poems 1982-2012. His forthcoming books are To the Left of Time and an edited volume, Selected Poems of Bill Knott. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also received the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book, Split Horizon.
* Making Poems from the Way Poems Work with Carl Phillips
A poem is not a car, but looking under a poem’s hood can be useful. This workshop will look at five to six techniques as employed in the poems distributed during the week, using those techniques both as ways to generate new poems and as a way to revitalize and re-see drafts of poems-in-progress. By week’s end, the workshop will have brought those poems-in-progress to completion or close to, and with new work, either finished or ready for revision.
Carl Phillips is the author of 13 books of poems, most recently Reconnaissance and Silverchest. He has also published two books of prose, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination, and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry; and he is the translator of Sophocles’s Philoctetes. His awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
* Establishing, Sustaining & Shifting Poetic Tone: Revisions with Martha Rhodes
This workshop will focus on how to establish, sustain and shift tone in poems. Participants will look at each poem presented with an eye toward diction, punctuation, line, stanza, pacing, etc. and how these craft elements influence the realization of poems
Martha Rhodes is the author of five collections of poetry: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), Mother Quiet, The Beds, and The Thin Wall. Her poems have been published in journals such as Agni, Columbia, Fence, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Widely anthologized, her work appears in Agni 30 Years, Appetite: Food as Metaphor, BOA Editions, Ltd.; Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, Last Call: Poems on Alcoholism, Addiction, and Deliverance, (Sarabande) among others. She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California at Irvine, and currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has been a visiting or guest poet at many colleges and universities around the country and has taught at conferences such as the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Frost Place, and Sarah Lawrence Summer Conference. She serves on publishing panels at colleges, conferences and arts organizations, and is a regular guest editor at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Colrain Manuscript Conference. In 2010, she took over the directorship of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. In addition, Rhodes is the director of Four Way Books, publishers of poetry and short fiction, located in New York City.
Individual Conferences
Participants, whose tuition is paid-in-full, may schedule a one-on-one conference with one of the Festival’s experienced faculty for a full-hour session. There is an additional cost of $99 for these conferences, which will be scheduled outside workshop sessions. Manuscripts must be prepared advance of the festival. Conferences will be scheduled on a first come-first served basis. Conference faculty includes:
Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Her books include Second Skin and Talking Underwater. Her poems have appeared in BigCityLit, Lumina, New York Times, Nimrod, The Paris Review, PBS News Hour, Prairie Schooner, Poetry London, RATTLE, Rattapallax, Spoon River Poetry Review and in the Helicon Nine anthology, Chance of A Ghost. In 2008, she was invited to read in the “Love Poems Program” at the Library of Congress. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. She teaches Modern Poetry and Creative Writing at Manhattanville College.
Nicole Brown
Her books include her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems, and Fanny Says, a biography-in-poems of her grandmother to be published by BOA Editions in May 2015. She studied at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was an editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent literary press, Sarabande Books, for 10 years and was a National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books. Currently, she teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry.
Ginger Murchison
With Thomas Lux, Ms. Murchison founded POETRY at TECH, where she served as associate director for five years and has been one of its McEver Visiting Chairs in Poetry since 2009. A three-time Pushcart nominee, she is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s M.F.A. Program for Writers and Editor-in-Chief of the acclaimed Cortland Review. Her first chapbook of poems, Out Here, was published in 2008. She has published interviews with A.E. Stallings and Stephen Dobyns, and has poems published in Atlanta Review, Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine, Poetry Kanto, and Mead and Connotations online.
Mayhem Performance Poetry at the Field House
The Mayhew Poets: Mason Granger & Scott Raven
Saturday at 9:30 pm, January 21
At the Field House at Old School Square
Mason Granger
Originally from Philly, raised in Willingboro, and currently living in Queens NYC, Mason Granger has been a full-time member of the performance poetry trio The Mayhem Poets since 2005. With a style that’s equal parts smart and smile, he gets his points across in a way that leaves audiences hopefully a little more knowledgeable and feeling a little better than when they arrived. Granger is also the creator of SlamFind, the world’s first mobile app dedicated to performance poetry that allows poetry fans to discover and connect with live poetry venues and individual poets all over North America. SlamFind poetry videos have been featured by The Huffington Post, Upworthy, Buzzfeed, Cosmo and many more. In addition, he has been featured in magazines such as Vibe, Complex, Fader and Rolling Stone.
Scott Raven
A graduate of Rutgers University with a double degree in Acting and Journalism, Scott Raven co-founded The Mayhem Poets. His performance work has been featured by Fiat, Purina, CNN, and The Today Show. His written work has appeared in the New York Times and New York Post. He is the author of Sconnettts, a collection of poems based on his past romantic relationships, his family, and his athletic background; The Polygons, Surrealist Poems: Volume 1; and the upcoming “6 Piece Chicken (performable poems and stories from on tour).” He’s also an actor in commercials, plays and films and proud new member of the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG). Raven grew up in Edison, NJ, and currently lives in Harlem, NYC.
How to Apply for PBPF Workshops
Each Palm Beach Poetry Festival 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 online 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 14, 2016.
Tuition for workshops is $895 and includes five three-hour workshop sessions; admission to all festival events, including a ticket to attend the Festival gala and to read at open mics at the Poetry Festival book store. Limited scholarship assistance may be available.
Tuition for Auditors is $495 and includes observation of a workshop and admittance to all Festival events except the gala. Auditing is offered for beginning poets who may be shy about sharing their poems, or non-poets, and is a great opportunity to learn by observing and listening.
The cost for an optional One-on-One Conference is $99, and will be scheduled after acceptance.
Applications require a $25 non-refundable application fee plus a $225 tuition deposit. Tuition balances are due upon acceptance to a workshop.
The 13th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival will be held January 16-21 at Old School Square in Delray Beach. The Festival features top poets at numerous ticketed public events, including readings, talks, interviews, panel discussions and more. Nine workshops will be offered for which applications are required.
The 2017 Palm Beach Poetry Festival is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; Morgan Stanley & The Legacy Group of Atlanta; the Cultural Council of Palm County, the Palm Beach County Tourism Development Council and the Board of Commissioners of Palm Beach County; The Palm Beach Post; Visit Florida; WLRN; and Murder on the Beach, Delray Beach’s independent bookseller.
For more information about the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, please visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org.