Subject + Form = Content: An Active Imagination

Paul Muldoon gives a close reading of Robert Frost's "Directive", a poem that seems capable of standing at the end of almost every trail in the rest of Frost's own work, but also of helping a reader find a way through the densities of 20th, perhaps even 21st, century poetry.

Reading and Publication party for participants in the Poetry in The Branches: Teen Writing Workshop with Sydney A. Francis

Anna Akhmatova, sometimes called 'the poet who buried Stalin' was a writer who pursued her work under extreme conditions of state oppression. She has come to represent the persistence of poetic conscience in the twentieth century. This lecture will look more closely at Akhmatova's poems, from her early love lyrics to her final masterpiece Poem Without a Hero, and we will listen to some recordings of Akhmatova's beautiful rhythmic recitations of her work.

Anna Akhmatova, sometimes called 'the poet who buried Stalin' was a writer who pursued her work under extreme conditions of state oppression. She has come to represent the persistence of poetic conscience in the twentieth century. This lecture will look more closely at Akhmatova's poems, from her early love lyrics to her final masterpiece Poem Without a Hero, and we will listen to some recordings of Akhmatova's beautiful rhythmic recitations of her work.

Instead of creating stable, easily decoded pages, we'll create a series of -graphic poems,-layered surfaces of documents, historical records, maps, hand-written notes, pages from old books, our own writings, and pieces of everyday text and paper. We'll start with investigative writing-researching events and landscapes at the intersection of civic and personal history, culling words, and fashioning poems and prose from what we find.

Art, wrote filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky, is a means of assimilating the world, an instrument for knowing it in the course of one's journey toward "absolute truth." This workshop uses film to inspire and generate poems, seeking what some filmmakers call the "authentic," bearing in mind that, as Tarkovsky said, "the indisputably functional role of art lies in the idea of knowing, where the effect is expressed as shock, as catharsis." Using films by recent and contemporary auteurs, exercises using imagery, ideas, emotions, and other elements from the films, and selected readings, the poet will t

What are Langston's lessons? An examination of the work of Langston Hughes will help you learn more about America. It will help you explore the tough tapestry of race. His work will make you look into the mirror and see yourself. Are you ready? Who was this man who taught us how to dream? The life and work of Langston Hughes echoes the social transformation of America from the 1920s to the early 1960s. How did he put blues and jazz into his words? What was his secret? Come dance with the dreamer and discover how he changed literature.

Patricia Spears Jones will discuss the life and work of Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005), a pivotal figure in the Black Arts Movement and author of such poetry books as Chances are Few and Dancing on Main Street.