Events featuring David Hernandez, Camille Dungy, Erika Meitner, Geffrey Davis, Keetje Kuipers, Leila Chatti, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Sierra Nelson, Supritha Rajan, Troy Jollimore, Sierra Nelson, Kary Wayson, Wendy Willis, David Biespiel, Heather Altfeld, Laura Read, Zach Savich, and more
If it mattered it mattered only because / it was our constant companion
January 5 Jason Witmarsh, Writers on Writing Lecture Series “Occupy that critical part of your brain–the thing that says, ‘this is useless’–and give that part of your brain a crossword puzzle, while the other part writes.” (J.W. on: writing in form) January 6 Rebecca Albiani on Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Frye “William Blake couldn’t stand falsity in anyone . . . and so he was a difficult companion.” March 11 Barbara Courtney, Tiny House Reading Series, hosted by Emily Johnson “You will have to learn . . . how to dispense with teachers, even me.” April 14 Troy Jollimore, Seattle Arts & Lectures “Any really good poet has to be philosophical . . . if you pursue any field long enough you eventually end up doing philosophy.” April 16 Andrew Feld, Open Books “I don’t think there are that many people these days writing narrative-poems-in-heroic-couplets-that-are-visionary-quests. So, I sort of enjoy doing that.” April 22 Gregory Laynor, Tiny House Reading Series “I think I’m more of a worry doll than a poet . …
Sometimes I finish a poem and then spend weeks or months trying to find the right title, but “My GPS Speaks” was a case of finding the title first and then trying to write the poem that went with it. Once I had “puppy love” and “radar love” I had a sense of how the poem would move, logically speaking—that it would proceed by association and zip from one phrase or concept or image to another, something like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake, but not in a straight line. No straight lines seemed to be the rule. The crucial thing seemed to be to find pairs of phrases that had some kind of electricity between them. I had the ‘siege engines’/’search engines’ pair in my notebook from months before, and once the pairing of ‘tornado shelter’ and ‘tax shelter’ presented itself to me I knew I was onto something. The finished piece feels to me like a summary of cosmic wisdom presented by a lecturer who is slowly, or maybe not …
