As if developing our plans for the 2015 Southwest Festival of the Written Word (Friday-Sunday October 2-4, 2015), wasn’t keeping us busy enough, we decided it was important to provide events to support reading and writing, prior to the 2015 Festival.
What were we thinking? That this would be a good thing! And to that end, we are presenting a weekend for the enjoyment of writers and readers of poetry and of prose, including evening presentations open to the public free of charge, and writing workshops on Saturday for which the costs vary.
This blog entry highlights the Evening Events that offer insight into the life of a poet (REFLECTIONS OF AN ARTIST) and the opportunity to listen to authors of poetry and prose read from their own works. (AN EVENING WITH STARS OF POETRY AND PROSE)
To find out more about the writing workshops, click here The Scalpel and the Thread and here Soup to Nuts and Speed Date with a Publisher
REFLECTIONS OF AN ARTIST
LANDSCAPE AND LANGUAGE: A POET’S ARTIST
with Denise Low
former Kansas Poet Laureate and co-publisher of Mammoth Publications
Thursday, October 2, 2014, 6:00pm
WNMU Parotti Hall, attached to the Fine Arts Theatre
Open to the Public free of charge
Co-sponsored by Western Institute for Lifelong Learning (WILL)
“Mélange” is a geologist’s term for varied rocks jumbled together within the earth’s crust. Denise Low explores the cultural geography applications of this term in this artist’s lecture about her recent book of poetry Mélange Block.
Included are connections to Sonoma County Wine Country, the Springerville Volcanic Field, and sedimentary expanses of the Great Plains. She shows how and where her writings parallel the landscape paintings of Per Kirkeby (Danish), Paul Hotvedt, and others. Black Mountain poets who inspire her deep geology are Charles Olson, Kenneth Irby, and Ed Dorn.
Also, part of the physical mixture is the diversity of bloodlines in her family—Algonquin, Cherokee, British Isles, and German. For yet a different type of blending, she explores how previous histories of landscape can influence narratives of present-day people.
Finally, she returns to geologic processes to illustrate how they are models for her verse forms. Rather than sonnets or haiku, she structures poems as Aggregates, Crystal cleavages, Dendritic branching, Magma flow, and more. Always, fire burns in realms of both human passion and underground reservoirs of magma.
Denise has published 25 books including: Melange Block; Ghost Stories; and, Natural Theologies:Essays. She currently teaches literature at Baker University School of Professional and Graduate Studies. She conducts workshops that include revision techniques, historic voices, ekphrastic (image and text) poetry and natural laws of poetry. Visit Denise’s website at www.deniselow.net
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AN EVENING WITH THE STARS OF POETRY AND PROSE
Readings and signings
novelist Mary Sojourner and poet Denise Low
and Silver City Poet Laureate Elise Stuart
Saturday, October 4, 2014, 7:00pm
614 N Bullard
Open to the Public free of charge
Mary Sojourner Elise Stuart Denise Low
www.breakthroughwriting.net www.swwordfiesta.org www.deniselow.net
