Tuesday, April 2, 2013


Attention COWG Poets, here is an invitation from the Oregon Poets Association:

If you haven't yet registered for OPA's Spring 2013 Conference in Silverton, this Friday, April 5, is the postmark deadline to pre-register at the reduced rate of $55 and to be guaranteed lunch. Full conference information, including a conference registration form and a book table registration form, are on the OPA website at http://www.oregonpoets.org/content/opa-conferences.

There are still slots for individual consultation on a group of poems! If you would like to have 5 or 6 of your poems (10 pages max.) reviewed by Chris Anderson, Barbara Drake, Donna Henderson, or Lex Runciman, include the optional $15 fee for consulting, indicate your first and second choices for consultant, and send the poems right away.

Workshop leaders Don Colburn and Jennifer Richter have just sent descriptions of their workshops. The conference schedule is set up to allow everyone registered to take both, one in the morning and one in the afternoon:
TIME TO RENEW! ACT NOW! SPECIAL OFFER!  POEM-MAKING AS RENEWAL
with Don Colburn

Make it new, said Ezra Pound, that brilliant crackpot. Great advice in just three hard-working words.  But, to borrow and bend a line from another of our forerunners, William Carlos Williams: So much depends on what you mean by “it.” And “new.” Let’s renew our  poetic licenses (and, yes, mix some metaphors) by brainstorming how to do two nearly contradictory things: 1) Start a poem by getting some words down onto a blank page, and 2) Revise that scribble into something like a poem. Isn’t renewal – make it new – critical to each? We’ll share examples, tell stories and offer suggestions that might help one another. I’ll bring some handouts to provoke or steer the conversation.

Suggested Donation: Bring a poem, by you or anyone else, that you find renewing, however you define that. Maybe we can build our own (renewable) anthology.

OBSESSIONS
with Jennifer Richter

This workshop will help you identify or reconnect with the underlying obsessions that drive your work.  In a recent New York Times Book Review, J. Robert Lennon observes, “…it is hard for any writer to recognize what those obsessions are, to face them squarely when they are frightening or puzzling, and to shape them into persuasive works of art.”  To this end, we’ll examine published examples of individual poets’ thematic and structural obsessions, I’ll offer prompts to spark your own poetry, and you’ll leave the conference launched back into your writing lives with renewed energy and focus.

If you have any questions, please contact Eleanor Berry by e-mail at eberry@wvi.com.

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