LiTFUSE

LitFuse 2007:  A Poets’ Workshop

 

Saturday, November 3.

• 8:30 – 9:15                        Registration – Warehouse (staffed until 10:30)

·    8:30 – 1:00            LitFuse Cafe – Warehouse (coffee/tea also available between classes in Harvest Hall)

·    9:20 – 9:30            Director’s Welcome – Michael Schein –
Warehouse Barn Room

·    9:30 – 10:20            Ingathering & Walking meditation
Carol Trenga – Warehouse Barn Room

• 10:30 – 11:50            First Breakout Sessions

v    Cody Walker – Walt Whitman – Book Arts Studio – Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” first published in 1855, ends with the following challenge: “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”  We’ll take Whitman up on this challenge, as we examine his continuing relevance as a poet and (at times) a provocateur.  Poems such as “Song of Myself” and “Respondez!” will serve as models for our own work.  And we’ll discover one potential surprise: Whitman is really funny.

v    Kathleen Flenniken – Taking the Dross Out – Harvest Hall – Our poems can be overwhelmed by extraneous introductions, images, explanation, and poetic language, but sometimes that dross is hard to isolate.  We’ll talk about some easy traps, and a few techniques that will help us strip our poems down to their beautiful essentials.  Please bring a poem or two in need of revision.

·    11:50 – 12:50            Lunch (not included) – LitFuse Cafe – Warehouse
or Vickie’s (Wisconsin & Maple)

• 1:00 – 3:50                        Second Breakout Sessions

v    Carla Schultz & Clare Carpenter – Letterpress Typesetting (preregistration required) – Print Shop (Warehouse)

v    Paul Nelson – Organic Poetry, Part 1 – Harvest Hall – What’s the force behind powerful poetry? Lorca called it “Duende” and Charles Olson “poem as high energy construct.” The process of training your ear to capture the chaotic energy of the moment is sometimes called “Organic Poetry,” where composition is an experiment in consciousness. This is an entertaining workshop for serious writers of all levels of experience who enjoy the sense of community. It includes sound from interviews with poets of this tradition, lively discussions & writing exercises designed to help you allow the act of writing to be an exhilarating revelation of content.

v    Dan Peters – Triggering Tieton – Based on Hugo’s “Triggering Town”, poetry rooted in place – Book Arts Studio

·    3:50 – 4:10            Coffee/Tea/Snacks – Harvest Hall

·    4:10 – 5:30

v    Panel Discussion – Harvest Hall:
The Role of the Poet in the American Empire
Susan Rich, Jonathan King, Cody Walker, Kathleen Flenniken Moderator:  Michael Schein

·    5:40 – 10:00            Bookstore Open – Warehouse
Book Signings from 5:40 – 6:30

• 5:40 – 6:20                        Social Hour – No-host bar – Warehouse

·    6:30 – 8:15            Mighty Tieton, LLC presents the LitFuse Banquet – Harvest Hall – Keynote by Susan Rich:
The Alchemist’s Kitchen:  Food, Sex & Citizenship

·    8:30 - 10:00            Jonathan King, Filmmaker – Voices in Wartime – Warehouse

Sunday, November 4.

·    8:30 – 1:00            LitFuse Cafe Open – Warehouse (coffee/tea also available between classes in Harvest Hall)

·    9:00 – 9:50            The Creative Breath:  Insight Beyond Thought
Carol Trenga – Warehouse Barn Room

• 10:00 – 11:50            Third Breakout Session

v    Carla Schultz & Clare Carpenter – Letterpress Printing (preregistration required) – Print Shop (Warehouse)

v    Paul Nelson – Organic Poetry, Part 2 – Harvest Hall – See description from Saturday.

v    Dan Peters – Poetry inspired by Tieton’s art – Book Arts Studio

·    12:00 – 12:50            Lunch (not included) – LitFuse Cafe – Warehouse
or Vickie’s (Wisconsin & Maple) or Portalles (Maple)

• 1:00 – 2:20                        Fourth Breakout Session

v    Carla Schultz & Clare Carpenter – Letterpress Printing (preregistration required) – Print Shop (Warehouse)

v    Cody Walker – Synesthesia – Harvest Hall – In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov writes of his “colored hearing.”  A long a evokes weathered wood; b has a tone of burnt sienna.  Nabokov was a synesthete, someone for whom one sense becomes jumbled with another.  We’ll read poems by Emily Dickinson and Charles Baudelaire that employ synesthesia.  Then we’ll cross our imaginative wires and write a few pages of our own.

v    Kathleen Flenniken – Family Dynamics: Selecting and Ordering Your Poems for Maximum Effect – Book Arts Studio – How do you pull in an audience, an editor, a judge who is awarding a grant or prize?  Some poems are more enticing than others.  We'll discuss how to identify and arrange your best work and watch heads turn

·    2:30 – 3:40            Open Mic Poetry or Short Prose – Warehouse
Moderator: Michael Schein

• 2:30 – 4:00                        Bookstore Open – Warehouse

·    3:00 – 3:40            Tour of Mighty Tieton –  Mike Longyear
Meet at Book Arts Studio

·    3:40 – 4:00            Coffee/Tea/Snacks – Warehouse

·    4:00 – 4:50            Sharing & Closing Circle
Carol Trenga – Warehouse Barn Room

• 5:30                      Meet at Yakima Poetry Pole to post broadsides & poems

Notes on Faculty:

• Susan Rich is the winner of the PEN USA Poetry Award as well as the Peace Corps Writers Poetry Award for The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World (White Pine Press, 2000).  Her new book, Cures include Travel (White Pine Press, 2006), tells us that the world is much larger than we usually like to admit.  Susan has worked as a staff person for Amnesty International, an electoral supervisor in Bosnia, a human rights trainer in Gaza, a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Niger, and a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Cape Town.  Susan’s international awards include invitations from the USIS to work in Zimbabwe as a writer-in-residence, a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, and a Ruben Rose Award from Israel. Other poetry honors include an Artist Trust Fellowship, the Rella Lossy Award from the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Sojourner Poetry Award, the Glimmer Train Poetry Award, and the William Stafford Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals both in the United States and internationally. Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard University, and the University of Oregon, Susan Rich lives in Seattle and teaches at Highline Community College and the Antioch University MFA Program in LA. She is an active member of the Somali Rights Network, an alum of Cottages at Hedgebrook, and an editor at Floating Bridge Press.
• Kathleen Flenniken's first poetry collection, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Prize and was named an ALA Notable Book for 2007. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Poetry, Poetry Daily, and The Iowa Review, and she is the recipient of literary fellowships from the NEA and Artist Trust. Kathleen is an editor at Floating Bridge Press. She has taught creative writing at The Northwest School and has worked with a number of arts agencies, including Writers in the Schools, Powerful Partners, and the Washington State Arts Commission Residence program.
• Jonathan King is a Web/communications consultant and writer for nonprofit organizations. King is the producer of Voices in Wartime, a feature-length documentary that looks at the experience of war through poetry. He has more than 15 years experience as a journalist and producer for television, radio, newspapers and magazine and has reported on a wide range of issues, including the Iran-Contra affair, covert operations, nuclear safety and secrecy, the environment, computer technology, and consumer safety. He is the author of two books on environmental issues. He currently serves as president of the board of ONE/Northwest, which provides strategies to the Pacific Northwest environmental community for communicating and building relationships.
• Paul Nelson – Poet, Teacher, Broadcaster, and President of the Washington Poets Association, Paul Nelson founded Global Voices Radio and co-founded the Northwest Spokenword LAB (SPLAB!) in Auburn, Washington. He earned his M.A. from Lesley University in Organic Poetry. Poetry and essays have been published around the world in Dirt, The Argotist, The Raven Chronicles, Unlikely Stories, The Time Garden, Fulcrum, the OlsonNow blog and other publications, on and off-line and he has performed his work at a number of venues. A Broadcaster for 26 years, he interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Michael McClure, Robin Blaser, Wanda Coleman, Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Eileen Myles, George Bowering and other North American poets and uses sound from those interviews in poetry workshops, having facilitated more than 300. He is working on an epic poem re-enacting Auburn history, writes at least one American Sentence everyday, and is Office Skills Instructor at the Muckleshoot Tribal College in the shadow of Tahoma.
• Dan Peters teaches writing at Yakima Valley Community College in Yakima, Washington.  He and Amy live in Selah.  He is the author of The Reservoir (Blue Begonia Press 2002), and co-editor of Weathered Pages: the Poetry Pole (Blue Begonia Press 2005).  Throws right, writes left.
• Carla Schultz set up the studios and presses at Marquand Editions.  A native of Tieton, Carla holds a BFA in Book Arts from Oregon College of Art & Craft.
• Carol Trenga, practices and teaches yoga, somatic movement, and meditation. She began to develop these practices during twenty years of studying, teaching and working in biological sciences.  Realizing that “life was calling”, she left the study of science to those with more faith in the rational mind. In her teaching, she explores movement, meditation, cultivating self-awareness and living with clear intention. Carol holds a doctorate in Environmental Health from the University of Washington.  She is a graduate of the Pacific Yoga Teacher Training Program, and a student of the Feldenkrais Method and Russell Delman’s Embodied Life program.
• Cody Walker, the current Seattle Poet Populist, teaches English at the University of Washington and poetry through Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program. He also serves as a writer-in-residence at the Richard Hugo House. Cody received the 2003 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah and the 2005 Distinguished Teaching Award from the UW English Department. His work appears on buses and bookmarks, as well as in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Parnassus, Slate, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, and Light. He recently received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
• Clare Carpenter is a book artist and letterpress printer living in Portland, Oregon, where she has been the proprietor of Tigerfood Press, an artist book publisher and small job press, since 1999.  She is the author/illustrator of Revival; An Atlas (Tigerfood Press 2007).  In her own art, she uses hand-set type, linoleum and wood-block prints, and her writing to create mostly fictional narratives in the form of illustrated books, broadsides and posters.  The themes that pervade her work are urban myths, historical subjects, and the meaning of place in people’s lives.  The work itself is often representational and graphically oriented, but layered with the text it becomes a reading experience as well.
• Michael Schein, LitFuse Director, is a poet and novelist whose work appears (among other places) in Slow Trains, Chrysanthemum, The Ledge, Pontoon 8 & 9 (Floating Bridge Press), American Drivel Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, RockSaltPlum, Runes, Lilies & Cannonballs Review, American Atheist, Drash, The November 3^rd Club, and an anthology, The Art of Bicycling (Breakaway Books 2005).  His work has received several awards, and been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  Michael serves on the speakers’ bureau of the ACLU of Washington, and he is the Executive Director of Tieton Arts & Humanities. 
  

 

NORTHWEST POETS UNiTE!