Natasha Trethewey Visits James Madison University

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Visits JMU
Harrisonburg, Va.
Mar 23, 2009

James Madison University hosted a Pulitzer Prize winner Monday night. Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her recent collection of poems, "Native Guard."

Read the entire article here:
http://www.whsv.com/news/headlines/41723402.html


Watch the WHSV3 Interview here:
http://ww2.whsv.com/global/video/flash/popupplayer.asp?ClipID1=3578211&h1=Pulitzer%20Prize%20Winning%20Poet%20Visits%20JMU&vt1=v&at1=News&d1=52881&LaunchPageAdTag=News&fvCatNo=&backgroundImageURL=&activePane=info&rnd=39902383

"The Line: Here" Camille Dungy at The Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

The Line: Here

Three of the grand mysteries: What makes a poem? What makes a stanza? What makes a poetic line?

James Longenbach opens his most recent book on the craft of writing with this quote from George Oppen: “The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.” For the next 120-odd pages Longenbach details his opinions on The Art of the Poetic Line.

The first two sentences of the book read thus: “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing.” He goes on to say (though I am still quoting only the preface): “The line’s function is sonic, a way of organizing the sound of language, and only by listening to the effect of a particular line in the context of a particular poem can we come to understand how lines work.”

Read the entire post here:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/03/the_line_here_1.html

Dan Albergotti Featured at "How a Poem Happens"

How a Poem Happens
Contemporary Poets Discuss the Making of Poems

Monday, March 9, 2009
Dan Albergotti

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), selected by Edward Hirsch as the winner of the 2007 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. In 2008, his poem “What They’re Doing” was selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses. A graduate of the MFA program at UNC Greensboro and former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review, Albergotti currently teaches creative writing and literature courses and edits the online journal Waccamaw at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC.


VESTIBULE


I sometimes wish I could find Cindy
to thank her for agreeing with my fine idea
that we sneak into the university chapel
late one night in 1983 to make love.
I don't just want to thank her for giving me
the trump card — “house of worship”—
I hold in every stupid party game that begins,
“Where's the strangest place you've ever . . . ?”
No, I want to thank her for the truth of it.
For knowing that the heart is holy even when
our own hearts were so frail and callow.
Truth: it was 1983; we were nineteen years old;
we lay below the altar and preached a quiet sermon
not just on the divinity of skin, but on the grace
of the heart beneath. It was the only homily
we knew, and our souls were beatified.
And if you say sentiment and cliché, then that
is what you say. What I know is what is sacred.
Lord of this other world, let me recall that night.
Let me again hear how our whispered exclamations
near the end seemed like rising hymnal rhythm,
and let me feel how those forgotten words came
from somewhere else and meant something.
Something, if only to the single moth
that, in the darkened air of that chapel,
fluttered its dusty wings around our heads.

Read the interview here:
http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2009/03/dan-albergotti.html

Camille Dungy at The Poetry Foundation

Camille Dungy

"For oh, I fear"

I’ve spent at least eight hours of each of the past four days reading other people’s poems. I am attending to word choice, comma placement, the arrangement of lines on the page. I am remembering, in this process, how vulnerable we poets make ourselves each time we take first the risk of writing poems and then the subsequent risk of sending these poems out into the world. This can be a terrifying prospect, writing and then sharing poetry. What I like to read, now and again, are poems that speak directly to the perils of this art.

I thought of this idea when I ran across this poem:

"Poetry"

Sometimes I tremble like a storm-swept flower,
And seek to hide my tortured soul from thee,
Bowing my head in deep humility
Before the silent thunder of thy power.
Sometimes I flee before thy blazing light,
As from the specter of pursuing death;
Intimidated lest thy mighty breath,
Windways, will sweep me into utter night.
For oh, I fear they will be swallowed up—
The loves which are to me of vital worth,
My passion and my pleasure in the earth—
And lost forever in thy magic cup!
I fear, I fear my truly human heart
Will perish on the altar-stone of art!

Claude McKay, from Harlem Shadows (1922)

Read the entire post here:
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/03/for_oh_i_fear.html

Natasha Trethewey in The Natchez Democrat

Mississippi natives honored

By Adam Koob | The Natchez Democrat

Published Sunday, February 22, 2009

NATCHEZ — On Saturday evening the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration honored two Mississippi natives with the Richard Wright Excellence Award.

Authors Carolyn Haines and Natasha Trethewey were recognized for their excellence in writing.

Haines, a novelist, and Trethewey, a poet, were both at the event to accept their awards.

While the authors credited Wright and Eudora Welty, the celebration’s honoree, as the initial inspirations for their works, both gave thanks to their fellow Mississippians for their ongoing inspiration.

Read the entire article here:
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/2009/feb/22/miss-natives-honored/