Saturday, October 8:

10:00 am -11:30 am - Small Group Session w/ Patrick Pritchett @ Historic Y
I plan to do something on ekphrasis -- the verbal representation of a pictorial image. Workshop participants are asked to bring a photo or image that they will use as the basis for making a poem. In addition, we will read classic examples of ekphrasis that will serve as templates, from Auden to Cole Swensen. Attendees should bring a photo - either personal or commercial, even a famous one - or some other pictorial image to use as a basis for writing poems. Limited to 25.

10:00 am -11:30 am - Small Group Session w/ David Shapiro @ Historic Y
Shapiro plans to discuss the relations of art, poetry, and architecture. Having been trained as a violinist, he is particularly interested in the musicality of repetition in all the arts. He will draw on theory and very practical examples. He will discuss student work that will flow from paintings or drawings, some made in class. He will answer questions on modern and contemporary artists with whom he has collaborated, such as Johns, Hejduk, and Keith Haring. The poet will welcome all to his class, including any local artists or musicians. The central theme of the class will be the joyful relationship between the "sister" arts, as they were called by the old humanists. And asserting Memory as central to all arts, Shapiro will recite favorite poems as examples.

10:00 am -11:30 am - Visual Art Small Group Session w/ Hilary Meehan @ studio #8 in the Toole Shed studios
A studio tour explaining how I work between words & images. My drawings & wall installations are like words & phrases that I combine to create an overall statement. They provide the final sentence or paragraph. My work is primarily drawing, bordering on painting. Limited to 20 participants.

11:30 am -1:00 pm- Small Group Session w/ Kathleen Fraser @ Historic Y
Subject focus for Kathleen Fraser's Small Group Session: Revision, as the movement from the comfy unconscious familiars of inherited sound (music) and culturally imbedded language to the unfolding of conscious choices: constructions, dictions, inventions, close-ups. Poets are invited to bring a one page Work-in-Progress that they are willing to actively think about revising during this session. Laptops are OK, if you have batteries. Yellow legal pads or working journals with pen/pencil & eraser & scissors, are just as good...ye olde "cut & paste" method that worked for many a year.

11:30 am -1:00 pm- Small Group Session w/ Will Alexander @ Historic Y
Details TBA

11:30 - 1:00 pm- Artist Talk / Gallery Tour @ Dinnerware
Dinnerware Art Gallery (101 W. Sixth Street, entrance on corner of 9th Avenue & 6th Street) will feature the following artists talking about their work, and to some extent, the relationship of their work to poetry & creative writing. All of them involve language in their work in one way or another. Jessica Drenk, sculptor -- uses books in her work; including print and language. Camelia Cosgray, mixed media artist uses language in her work. Christopher LaVoie, multidisciplinary artist, including mixed media, sculpture, and public art; language is a major part of his work. The show up at Dinnerware at the time will be the 26th Annual Dinnerware Art Auction, featuring more than 100 works of art donated by local artists to benefit this long-standing nonprofit gallery, which was founded in the late 1970's. The gallery director, Sarah Hardesty, will host the session. Questions by participants are encouraged.

Sunday, October 9:

12:00 - 1:30 pm- Small Group Session w/ Tenney Nathanson @ Historic Y
"He can / talk, but insolently says nothing"-Marianne Moore, "Peter"
As it happens, she was speaking about a cat. Is painting poetry's cat? Saying nothing, insolent or taciturn or not, it may inspire and rebuff the poet's words--a game poetry has repeatedly shown itself unable to avoid. (Painting may stand in for "things," or for someone else's ability to make a thing, not mouth some words.) We'll explore a little of this provocative oscillation between painting as instigation and as hindrance by playing with: how a poem might speak to a painting, or speak for it (ekphrasis), a game that may be epitaphic; how a poem might accompany a painting (if you had to read a poem while your audience looked at a painting, what sort of relation, or non-relation, between the poem and the painting would you want to establish?); how a poem might try to do what an absent painting does (can you look at a Pollock, put it away, and "write like that"?)

We may possibly glance at some published poems, but we'll more likely look at some (reproductions of) paintings and try our hand at writing poems which perform one of these tasks. I'll bring in some reproductions, but please feel free to bring in one or two as well: paintings that make some kind of claim on you as a writer, that you do (and don't) want to write to, or as, or along with, or in the place of. What are some of the ways in which a poem can approach doing what a painting does? What are some of the ways it can't?

12:00 - 1:30 pm- Small Group Session w/ Heather Nagami @ Historic Y
Drawing on Language -- Sometimes language, as we know it, just isn't enough. Vocabularies and the rules of grammar are finite, but the complexities of our feelings, thoughts, and thought processes are limitless. In this group session, we will explore alternate possibilities of expression and creation through a combination of writing and drawing. This session is for anyone who has ever felt uneasy about the gap between what's inside our heads and what comes out of our mouths and pens. Please bring unlined paper and a pen or pencil. Limited to 20.

Revised October 1, 2005