LiTFUSE

Friday, Sept. 25

12:30 – 1:00 Registration – Harvest Hall

1:00 – 4:30 George Bowering Master Class (preregistration required; this class is FULL, but there is plenty of room in all other LiTFUSE classes) – Harvest Hall.    

4:30 – 5:00 Registration – Harvest Hall

5:00 – 6:00 Carol Trenga – Free the MindBody & Release the BodyMind – Harvest Hall – Enhance creativity through Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement®.  No special clothing or props required.  

6:15 – 7:45 Taco Truck – Harvest Hall

7:15 – 8:00 Registration – Harvest Hall

7:45 – 9:45 Tara Hardy – Slam for Page Poets – Harvest Hall – ($5 - Open to the Public - Freeee w/ LiTFUSE registration).

Saturday, Sept. 26

8:00 – 10:00 Registration – Warehouse Atrium

8:00 – 10:00 LitFuse Cafe – Warehouse Atrium

8:30 – 9:00 Carol Trenga – Ingathering – Warehouse Gallery

9:00 – 9:10 Michael Schein – Director’s Welcome – Warehouse Gallery

9:20 – 11:20 Morning Breakout Sessions

9:20 – 11:20

Judith Roche – Generating New Poems – Book Arts Studio – Through a series of targeted exercises and reading an array of poets, both contemporary and older, we’ll work on generating new poems. Along the way we’ll discuss the elements of poetry (phanopoeia, melopoeia and logopoeia) and issues of craft. This is a writing and talking class. Our goal will be to have a number of poem starts, ideas, and inspirations to work on in your own time. If you are new to poetry, or if you are experienced but stuck somewhere in your poetic process, this will be a good class to get you going.

Carolyne L. Wright – Strong Measures and Nonce Sense: an Exaltation of Forms in Poetry – Harvest Hall – Despite those sonnets that scared us off in high school, forms have a delightful ability to draw poetry out of us that we didn't know we had!   In this workshop modeled on examples from Bashō to Bishop, we'll read and talk about and try writing some of these strong measures--sestina, villanelle, ghazal, pantoum, and syllable-count forms such as cinquain, haiku and hendecasyllabics.  And we'll enjoy "nonce" forms such as the abecedarian, the acrostic, the anaphoric "rant," the round, word-counted verse, and "the poet writes back / the poet strikes back" palimpsest poem that replies to works by other poets--to extend the conversation of poetry in new ways.

Mike Hickey – The Prose Poem – Warehouse Gallery – Developed by the French Symbolists, a prose poem is laid out on the page as if it were prose. It usually contains, however, heightened language (a reliance on the connotation of highly charged words), tension, movement, and obvious rhythmic structure to an extent that most prose does not. This form is an indication of the breakdown between prose and poetry, the blurring of the distinctions which separate one from the other. It shows the modern writer attempting to find new forms which are based on but different from the old ones. Not all poems are narrative, but the successful ones that are understand the fundamental structure of how to tell (and show) a story. This session will push you into the deep end of that pool.

11:20 – 12:40  Wander & wonder, confront art, imbibe & exhale.  Lunch (not included) – LitFuse Cafe (Warehouse Atrium), or Vickie’s (Wisconsin & Maple), or El Tapatio (Wisconsin). 

12:40 – 4:00 Afternoon Breakout Sessions

12:40 – 2:00

A.K. Allin – ShutterShots of Guerilla Poetry  – Warehouse Gallery – A narrated slide-show of text-based public performance art and visual poetry, intended to provoke a re-vision of what poetry can be.

Charles Potts – Charles Bukowski vs. Charles Olson – Book Arts – Intellect vs. anti-intellect, and whatever falls inbetween.

Leonard Orr - Infusing Your Poetry with Passion: Giving Yourself Permission to Express – Harvest Hall – Poetry of love and desire is often viewed as necessarily sentimental and trivial or derided as “greeting-card verse.” It is banned overtly by many editors in their Poet’s Market listings. It is difficult to dive down into the deep wells of passion and return to shareable language that conveys the complexities of feeling and it is easier to just write about a more public or less tender experience. But there is tremendous diversity of example from all cultures that can instruct poets now (Neruda, Dickinson, Whitman, Cummings, Eluard, Rilke, Ginsberg, Olds, the troubadours, and The Song of Songs). There are preliminary difficulties to overcome (forget the poems will be read by relatives or neighbors, for example). How to free the mind up (or put the censors aside), construct personas and voice, and let process take over? This workshop will study some examples of passionate poems and then we will work with some exercises to produce at least some seeds or partial drafts for poems to develop.

2:00 – 2:20 Tea & thee.

2:20 – 2:40 Carol Trenga – Breath & Movement Tune-Up – Tieton Town Green (Warehouse Gallery if raining)

2:40 – 4:00

Carolyne L. Wright – The Map-Maker's Colors—Topography, History, and Inner Transformation in the Poetry of Travel – Book Arts – In her poem "Arrival at Santos," Elizabeth Bishop chides herself for "immodest demands for a different world / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both at last."  She was a poet whose travels and powers of observation and description allowed her to enter into landscapes, cultures, and the human heart, from the perspective of the perpetual traveler, even in her own country.  In this workshop, we will dare to make those demands in our work, reading and discussing some of the great poetry of travel, and writing and sharing our own poems about cultures, landscapes, and human transformation.

Mike Hickey – Self-discovery Through Self-confrontation – Harvest Hall – Sometimes writing cuts close to the bone. Sometimes it is intensely and painfully personal. Yet most good writers know that there is no secret too precious to hide. Everything in life is just grist for the mill - everything! Still, where does therapy end and poetry begin? This session will open the door to writing about those traumatic events and relationships in life that need, almost demand, determined exploration. The key is to find an angle, slant, perspective that will allow the poem to transcend the "oh woe is me - life ain't fair" kind of self-pity. In literature, victims are boring. This session will help you to transcend victimization while still writing so close to the heart you might need a cardiologist in the room or at least on speed-dial.

Tara Hardy – On the Stage:  Reading Aloud/ Performing Your Poetry – Warehouse Gallery   – Honoring a poem on the stage is as much of a craft as writing it in the first place.  During this experiential workshop, we’ll be learning essential elements of performing and reading work aloud.  In addition to language itself, our tools become body, voice, inflection.  Bringing sound, rhythm, and intent forward from the page onto the stage can not only be a delightful experience, but also illuminate what is and is not working on the page. In addition, knowing how to present your work makes you more appealing to publishers.  No one will be forced to read aloud, but the willing should bring 1 minute of material.

4:00 – 4:20   Coffee & bibliophy.

4:00 – 7:00 LiTFUSE Bookstore - Warehouse

4:20 – 5:40 Channeling Our Forebears – Warehouse Gallery –   

Swil Kanim leads us through music and story from the heart of origin, into the arc of longing.  Beware:  poets of yesteryear may walk among us.

5:40 – 6:10 Prettify, edgy-up, distress-down.

6:10 – 7:00 Schmooze & Molt – No-host bar – Booksigning – Warehouse

7:10 – 9:00 The LitFuse Banquet – Harvest Hall – Keynote by George Bowering - Horizontal Surfaces: the Muse & the Project.

After Dessert:   Night Fishing on Tieton Town Green

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Sunday, Sept. 27

8:15 – 9:45   LitFuse Cafe – Warehouse Atrium

8:30 – 9:00 Carol Trenga – Awaken the MindBody, Move the BodyMind – Harvest Hall – QiGong self-massage & gentle yoga.  No special clothing or props required.

9:15 – 12:15 Morning Breakout Sessions

9:15 – 10:35

Charles Potts – Spiritual/Prophetic Poetry –  Harvest Hall – In 100 intently focused minutes, attendees will learn what makes writing prophetic and spiritual, according to the great novelist and critic, E.M. Forster, and the presenter, Charles Potts, as delineated in his 1998 essay, “A Reason to Read: The Structure of the Spirit” which became the introduction to Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry, edited by Potts. Further modifications to the practice were presented in a 2001 essay, “Prophetic Poetry,” originally published in The Temple. Samples of spiritual/ prophetic poetry will help poets to identify the characteristics of such poetry and explore their affinity to it. Well known northwest practitioners of this verse include Sharon Doubiago, Stephen Thomas, dan raphael, Karen Waring, Edward Smith, and Teri Zipf.

AK Allin – The Ritual Room, Session 1 – Warehouse Gallery – A powerful blend of poetry and ritual, The Ritual Room invites you to move through space and time that will heighten your awareness. Engage in a variety of rituals, in a hushed space, at various self-monitoring stations: “The Threshold,” “The Tightrope,” “The Nail of the North,” “Cocoon Therapy” and “The Atelier.” Partake in activities that lead you from prompt to experience, then on to poetry. The Ritual Room is an invitation to discover, unleash and create, with ritual in mind. It is more a experience than a class; equal part creation, exploration and observation. You will be asked, at some point, to sit and observe the others and to write about their movement. You will be invited to play with boundaries and connections, beginnings and ends, milestones and between times, passages and endpoints, peripheries and centers, stillness and movement. Come stretch your idea of where poetry stops and where living begins. Let The Ritual Room draw signifiers in the spaces around you.

10:35 – 10:55 Chit-chat, snicker-snack, omphaloskepsis.

10:55 – 12:15

A.K. Allin – The Ritual Room, Session 2 – Warehouse Gallery – A powerful blend of poetry and ritual, The Ritual Room invites you to move through space and time that will heighten your awareness. Engage in a variety of rituals, in a hushed space, at various self-monitoring stations: “The Threshold,” “The Tightrope,” “The Nail of the North,” “Cocoon Therapy” and “The Atelier.” Partake in activities that lead you from prompt to experience, then on to poetry. The Ritual Room is an invitation to discover, unleash and create, with ritual in mind. It is more a experience than a class; equal part creation, exploration and observation. You will be asked, at some point, to sit and observe the others and to write about their movement. You will be invited to play with boundaries and connections, beginnings and ends, milestones and between times, passages and endpoints, peripheries and centers, stillness and movement. Come stretch your idea of where poetry stops and where living begins. Let The Ritual Room draw signifiers in the spaces around you.

Judith Roche – Eternal Persons of the Poem, Writing from Myth and Fairy Tales – Harvest Hall – Gods and mythic personas play in and out of our literature and, through their stories, help us understand our own lives. Poet Robert Duncan calls them “Eternal Persons of the Dream,” and they live in our deepest psyches. This class will explore those archetypes by looking at poems based on the truth and life of myth and the dark heart of fairy tales, from writers who might include H.D., Homer, Levertov, Kizer, diPrima, Atwood, and Duncan, and write our own poems based on mythic consciousness.

Leonard Orr – Escaping the Rational: Generating Poems through Chance and Spontaneity – Book Arts – One common barrier to writing poetry is too much thinking gets in the way. It tames and smoothes, restores wildness to predictable order, and makes the writing a familial and expected experience. The finished poem is not a surprise; it is much like all of the other poems by that poet. This workshop will briefly discuss the aesthetics of accepting spontaneity and chance, randomness and happy accidents (from the Romantics to the Surrealists to the New York School). Most of the time will be devoted to creating poems using techniques derived from the Surrealists and the Oulipo writers (Organization of Potential Literature). The guiding sentiment is Allen Ginsberg’s repeated mantra of “first thought, best thought.” How can we get to that in our poems without ruining it with rationality?

12:15 – 1:15 Lunch (not included) – LitFuse Cafe (Warehouse Atrium) or Vickie’s (Wisconsin & Maple)

1:25 – 2:40 LitFuse Open Mic! – Harvest Hall

2:40 – 2:45 S t r e t c h

2:45 – 3:15 Featured Reading by George Bowering – Harvest Hall

As the spirit moves you:  Yakima Poetry Pole to post poems – 225 S. 15th Ave.,

Yakima 98902

6:56 pm Sunset – Yom Kippur begins

Note:  Schedule subject to change.