SPRING 2024
Pop-Up Poetry Spring Festival
April 14-15
Patricia Smith - Keynote
Celebrating National Poetry Month, we embrace Renaissance! Our gathering is infused by hope, cast in appreciation for the possibilities inherent in the rigors of creating, the craft of revising, the challenge of teaching, the rewards of learning, and the joy of performing and publishing poetry for both new and established poets. We hope you join our two-day event in April with Patricia Smith as Keynote Speaker (bio), the Spencer Undergraduate Poetry Awards ceremony, outdoor readings, and much more on the beautiful West Chester University campus.
Schedule of Events:
Sunday, April 14th
Grades 3-12 Poetry Contest Award Ceremony - 2pm - SECC Room 108
New Works Panel Presentation: We Come Bearing Gifts: New Books from Four Midwestern
Poets
with Lee Bahan, Daniel Bourne, John Drury, and Allison Joseph
3:30pm - SECC Room 108 (check back soon for hybrid zoom link)
Lee Bahan is the author of three chapbooks, Migration Solo, Notes to Sing, and To Wrestle with the Angel. Her first book of Petrarch translations, A Year of Mourning, was a special honoree for the 2016 Able Muse Book Award. Her second, Advent and Lent, also has been accepted by Able Muse Press. Lee's poems, translations, and prose have appeared in Able Muse, Artful Dodge, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The North American Review, Ploughshares, and Think Journal. She lives with her husband Pat in a hundred-year-old farmhouse outside Medora, IN.
Daniel Bourne was raised on a farm near the Little Wabash River in southeastern Illinois, and for
years worked in a rare book library at Indiana University. His books of poetry include
The Household Gods, Where No One Spoke the Language, and On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe, a collection of translations of the political poetry and essays of Polish poet Tomasz
Jastrun. Other poems and translations from Polish appear in such journals as Ploughshares, Guernica, American Poetry Review, Field, Salmagundi, Plume and Cimarron Review. Over the years, his stays in Poland have included a Fulbright Fellowship for translation in 1985-87
and a graduate exchange program between Indiana and Warsaw University during Martial
Law in 1982-1983. Most recently, he spent part of 2013 and 2014 in Poland to continue
his translation work as well as some writing projects involving Polish environmental
issues, including the primeval forest of Bialowieża and the island of Sobieszewo on
the Baltic Coast just to the east of Gdańsk. He teaches at The College of Wooster,
where he edits Artful Dodge.
John Philip Drury is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies (Able Muse Press, 2024). A book of creative nonfiction, Bobby and
Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in August 2024. He was born in Cambridge,
Maryland, and grew up in Bethesda. He earned degrees from Stony Brook
University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for thirty-seven years, he is now an
emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old
house on the edge of a wooded ravine.
Photo Credit: Tess Despres Weinberg
Monday, April 15th
Pop-Up Poetry Day!
Join WCU Students and Faculty on the Academic Quad beginning at 10:00am to visit activity tables and impromptu pop-up poetry readings on the stage. All are welcome to join the fun!
Master Class with Ernest Hilbert
“All is Silver”: Poetry and the Evocation of Place
“All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over.” When Elizabeth Bishop described a gray winter seaside in these terms, she immediately transported her readers to the place where the speaker of her poem stood and looked out on the scene. What techniques allow a poet to evoke a particular place persuasively and memorably? It may be a city, a house, a room, a tower, a tomb. It may be in a distant future or recalled from the past, a place one inhabits daily or one that is fantastically far away. It can be as small as a desk or a dinner table, as vast as a landscape or a planet seen from space. The possibilities are as intriguing as they are vast. In this workshop we will explore the ways in which a poet can conjure the sensation of being in a place that may be beautiful, unsettling, terrifying, ugly, calming; a place summoned from memory or cast purely from imagination. We will work on poems that capture places and build scenes. The visual cues may be strongly symbolic or merely exist in their own rights, but the place may seem real. Following a short introductory lecture by the workshop leader, you will use discussion and a series of prompts to work on your own poem, which you may share with others during the session, if you like. You will come away from the workshop with new skills and new ways of thinking, as well as a poem to continue working on. No previous experience is necessary. Email Dr. Cherise Pollard for more information.