PALM BEACH POETRY FESTIVAL

Returns to South Florida, January 21-26, 2013

11 Award-Winning Poets to be Featured at Ninth Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival Will Offer Eight Workshops, Craft Talks & Readings, Interview & Panel Discussion at Old School Square in Delray Beach

(Delray Beach, FL – July 25, 2012)  Miles Coon, Director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival (PBPF), today announced that the ninth annual festival is returning to Old School Square in Delray Beach for six days, January 21-26, 2013. Earlier this year, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival received the prestigious Muse Award for Outstanding Arts & Cultural Organization (budget under $500,000) from the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.

“Eight of America’s most gifted poets, including the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, will be in Delray Beach to teach workshops for qualified writers of poetry, once again offering a great learning opportunity to both local poets and those from around the globe,” said Coon. “Two extraordinary performance poets will bring their powerful voices to our late night coffee house on January 26, and I’m particularly proud to announce that former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, our special guest poet, will be interviewed by Ginger Murchison, Editor of the Cortland Review, on the afternoon of January 22, and will deliver the Festival Gala Reading on January 23, immediately following the Poetry Festival’s annual gala.   

“In addition to serving the writing community through our professional workshops, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival will once again offer numerous opportunities for the public to hear truly great poetry, written from and for our time, read by poets who engage and enthrall the audience,” added Coon. “They are a diverse group, ethnically, demographically and aesthetically.  When people hear them, they will hear America singing.”

Special Guest Poet:

Billy Collins Billy Collins is an American phenomenon.  No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. A Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion,” his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry, his readings are frequently standing room only and he is well known for his appearances on National Public Radio. His books Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, and Ballistics, and most recently, Horoscopes for the Dead. Among his many honors are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize — all awarded by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry. In 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003.  In 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. Billy Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.

Eight 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 a workshop as a great way to learn by observing and listening.

CRAFT MASTERY With

In this poetry workshop participants will critique each other’s poems, followed by a critique from Mr. Fairchlld. Participants should bring along four or five samples of their own work (one-page poems preferred). Works by master poets will be used to illustrate and discuss certain matters of craft and poetry assignments will be based on the issues raised during group discussions.  Poems by B.H. Fairchild have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and anthologies, including Best American Poems. He is the author of six collections of poetry. Usher, was chosen by the LA Times as one of their favorite 25 books in poetry or fiction published in 2009.  Trilogy, (2009 PennyRoyal Press) is a fine press limited-edition, and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, (Norton 2003) received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress. The Art of the Lathe, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, California Book Award, and Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Fairchild has received numerous fellowships and grants from the NEA, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Lannan Foundation and recently received Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and essay. He teaches at California State University, San Bernardino.

NEW SHADOWS:

Moving Poems from Imitation to Innovation With Terrance Hayes

This workshop is intended to help poets help themselves. It will offer concrete strategies for sustained writing when the only teacher available is a book. Participants will explore the ways inventive imitation can lead to poetic discovery and innovation. (Think of imitation as transformation not reproduction.) Daily writing assignments will involve discussing and then imitating published poems from a multitude of styles and traditions, and workshop poems will be discussed not for their merit as imitations, but for their originality and potential. Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Hurston Wright award. His other poetry books are Wind in a Box, Muscular Music, and Hip Logic. Other honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

ENLARGING POEMS With Jane Hirshfield

A poem’s largeness is not in its length, but in its depth, range, and openness. One reason to write a poem is to bring both language and self into unforeseen possibilities of being. In this workshop we will stretch from familiar ground toward the new. The workshop will be devoted primarily to writing new poems, each day bringing a different set of energies, craft strategies, and approaches to that task. We will work in the spirit of “starts,” experiments, generous explorations. We will also consider one previously written poem by each participant over the workshop’s course. Please bring writing materials; copies for the full group of a previously written poem (and a second, in case we have time for more) you do not consider finished; and five poems (not your own) you find thrilling (a page or less, no copies needed). Jane Hirschfield is the author of seven much honored books of poetry, including Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011) and a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry (Harper Collins, 1997). She has also edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets of the past. Hirshfield’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and seven editions of The Best American Poetry. Honors include The California Book Award, The Poetry Center Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A frequent presenter at universities and literary festival both in the US and abroad, in 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

A WORKSHOP ON LAYERING With Tony Hoagland

The question in writing poems is always, “How can I do justice to the complexity of life? How can I not oversimplify human nature?” One way to achieve richness of texture and implication is “layering.” This workshop will present examples of poems strong in variety of texture, variety of voice, and in layering of data and diction. Workshop exercises will focus on repertoire of tone, diction, data, and poetic structures to generate new work. Tony Hoagland has published four collections of poems, including Unincorporated Persons In The Late Honda Dynasty, and What Narcissism Means to Me. His recognitions include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the O.B. Hardisson Award for teaching, the James Laughlin Award, the Brittingham Prize, and the Mark Twain Award, for humor in American Poetry, as well as fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His essays about poetry appear widely. In 2008 Graywolf Press published a book of craft essays, titled Real Sofistakashun. Hoagland teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston.

THE POEM THAT WRITES ITSELF With Laura Kasischke

This workshop will discuss poems, offer critiques, and practice methods to explore memory and use imagination to find material for new poems. Through discussion of submitted poems, and some exercises, participants will examine and discover ways the unconscious might be harnessed in the service of poetry writing.

Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels.  For her most recent poetry collection, Space, In Chains, she received the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Other poetry collections include, Lilies, Without, Gardening in the Dark, Wild Brides, Housekeeping in a Dream, Fire and Flower and What It Wasn’t. Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and lives with her husband and son in Chelsea, MI.

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, including word-by-word, line-by-line readings. Robert Frost once declared 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. “We 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,” promises Lux. The latest collection of poems by Thomas Lux is Child Made of Sand, (Houghton Mifflin 2012). Other books include God Particles, The Cradle Place; The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems: 1970-1975; and Split Horizon, winner of the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. His distinguished teaching career includes twenty-seven years on the writing faculty and as Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence. He has taught at Emerson College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and other universities. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and recipient of three NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. 

SOMETHING PATTERNED, WILD AND FREE With Tracy K. Smith

A poem is a conundrum. It is made from language, and yet seeks to describe that which exists beyond or outside of ordinary speech. It begins in pursuit of one idea, image, concept or question, and enacts a “turn” or “transformation” that reveals more than what was initially sought. And the impact of poems – good poems – is to change the reader (and, hopefully, the poet) in ways that resonate well beyond the scope of a single idea or theme. With these ideas in mind, workshop participants will spend the first half of each session discussing a brief selection of published poems, and the second half will focus on critiquing student works. Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry.  Her most recent collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), was selected as a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Duende (2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question (2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. She teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

GEM TACTICS Deploying Ecstatic Ruses in Poems of Ardor With Lisa Russ Spaar

Paul Valéry once pointed out that “A poet’s function . . . is not to experience the poetic state:  that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.” How can writers create for the reader, in poems, an experience of “private,” subjective ardor, be it erotic, ecstatic, melancholy, religious, political, quotidian, cosmic, or other?  Metaphor, elision, syntax, juxtaposition, Heaney’s “binding secret” of sound textures, sampling, inter-textuality, varied registers of diction—what Dickinson called her “gem tactics” and Anne Carson: ruses. Workshop participants will look at how a discerning use of these and other poetic devices help to say the unsayable, deepen and open poems to what is at stake in them, as language acts, as testimony, as witness, as play.  This workshop will involve constructive critique of student poems and generation of new material. Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of three poetry collections Satin Cash, Blue Venus, and Glass Town, for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Forthcoming is a new collection, Vanitas, Rough, and a collection of her essays on contemporary poetry by Drunken Boat Editions due in early 2013. She is editor of Acquainted With the Night:  Insomnia Poems, and All That Mighty Heart:  London Poems (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2008). Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2009 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, Outstanding Faculty Award of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (2010), and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Award (2011), and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Spaar serves as poetry editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education Review and is Founder and Director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English.

Coffeehouse Performance Poets:

(Late Saturday Night, January 26)

Marty McConnell

Marty McConnell’s work explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion, and history. Using the perspectives of figures as diverse as Catholic saints, pop culture icons, and the population of the traditional tarot deck, Her poems both comment on and illuminate what it means to live in early 21st century America. She transplanted herself from Chicago to New York City in 1999, after completing the first of three national tours with the Morrigan, an all-female performance poetry troupe she co-founded. She received her MFA in creative writing/poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and competed in six National Poetry Slams with the NYC/louderARTS team. For nearly a decade, McConnell co-curated the flagship reading series of the New York City-based louderARTS Project, and she he appeared on both the second and fifth seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. She returned to Chicago in 2009 to co-found Vox Ferus, an organization dedicated to empowering and energizing individuals and communities through the written and spoken word. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, and her poem, “marrying the violence,” was named “Best of the Net” in 2007, and Bob Holman of About.com selected her CD, “the swallowed vowel” as one of the best spoken word CDs of that year. 

Rives

A poet and multimedia artist from New York City and The Road, Rives favors wordplay, romance and live experiences. He was kicked out of UCLA for attending too long. His best idea ever was not: quoting Catullus on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” He was a “Def Poetry Jam” touring cast member, the 2004 National Poetry Slam champ with Team Hollywood, and he is the co-host of the annual TEDActive conference in Palm Springs. Rives blogs at

How to Apply for PBPF Workshops:

Each PBPF 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 on-line 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 9, 2012. Tuition for workshops is $725 and includes five three hour workshop sessions; admission to all festival events, including invitations to attend the festival gala and to read at open mics at the Poetry Festival book store.  Limited scholarship assistance may be available. Auditors tuition is $350 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.

About the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2013:  

Eight faculty poets, a special guest poet and two performance poets will be featured at numerous ticketed public events, January 21-26, including readings, talks and a lively panel discussion.  In addition, the workshop participants will read at four open mics in the Poetry Festival’s bookstore, all free to the public.  For a complete list of the public events, refer to . 

Tickets will go on sale to the public later this year through the festival website and at the Crest Theatre Box Office at Old School Square.  General Admission ticket prices per event are $12/adult, $10/senior and $8/student.  Special student group rates are available.

The Palm Beach Poetry Festival is generously sponsored by Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney, the Windler Group of Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney’s Atlanta Office; the Cultural Council of , the Palm Beach County Tourism Development Council and the Board of Commissioners of Palm Beach County; ; WPBI-FM Classical South Florida; and , Delray Beach’s independent bookseller. All events take place in the Crest Theatre and Vintage Gymnasium of Old School Square in Delray Beach. In 2010, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival received an Arts Challenge Grant from

For more information about the Palm Beach Poetry Festival 2012, please visit .