Welcome

Welcome to the 2013 Poetry workshop, Thessaloniki and Thassos. This workshop meets under a pergola with a view of the Aegean, or it meets in a café near the water's edge, or one overlooking a marble quarry. We take our breaks in the water. Our poems feast on the poems of the ancient and modern Greeks, and draw from the light around us, and the full sails. When we have finished talking and writing, we go out with Stomatis on his boat to catch the fish we might have for dinner. In the evenings, we listen to poetry read to us near an olive grove, and then we feast and dance in circles to Greek songs. Sometimes we are up very late, lighting fires on the beach, so in the morning we have our tea and coffee first, with cheese and hard rolls and yoghurt under the grape leaves. In the late afternoons we learn a little Greek, or we write in our notebooks or float in the water looking up at the small clouds. We write a lot without worrying about whether or not the writing is “good.” We know that whether it is as yet “good” or not, it is the seed of something, or it is what we had to have written before we could write something else. We play with our poems and move things around in them. We let some words go. They go, they come back. Sometimes we let a Greek poet say something, or we become a Greek poet ourselves. The assignment is to soak up the light, read what everyone writes, and learn about octopus. The assignment is to light candles, have a little psipouru or something else, and learn some dances. To say kalimera to everyone in the morning and Καληνύχτα when we go back to our rooms at night. We hope to leave with many pages of something or another, and to see our work in new ways.˜

We'll most likely be meeting on the lovely terrace at my house (up the road from where you'll be staying). The plan is to meet on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings there and to meet on Wednesdays at Beach Two for intensive writing mixed with private consultations.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Greetings Post

Dear Poets,
    You are here because you are coming to Greece! We are going to have an extraordinary workshop on a beautiful pine and marble island in the northern Aegean. Using this blog is easy. To your right, under "pages," you will find a (growing) list of materials. You needn't work on these in advance. When you wish to introduce yourself, or post a poem just go to the top right of the blog and click on "New Post." That will bring you to a box where you can title your post (just to the left of the "publish" button) and a large box for composing or pasting in your post. Then click on "publish" (top right). When you want to comment, click on "No comments" or "comments" (depending on whether you are first to comment or not), and that will give you a comment box. If you have set up a google account with a photograph, your picture will appear whenever you make a post. If you have problems or questions, email me (carolynforche@gmail.com) and be sure to put in the subject line "Thassos Workshop." Welcome!
Warmly,
Carolyn
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1 comment:

  1. Carolyn ForchéMay 4, 2015 at 5:48 AM

    We will be reading translations of Greek poetry during our workshop. Here is what the late and wonderful poet Kenneth Rexroth had to say about translating poetry from Greek: "The first translation from the Greek that I ever did was the apple orchard of Sappho in my fifteenth year. It left me so excited with accomplishment that I couldn't sleep well for nights. Since that time, on the freight trains of my youthful years of wandering, in starlit camps on desert and mountain ranges, in snow-covered cabins, on shipboard, in bed, in the bath, in love, in time of loneliness and despair, in jail, while employed as an attendant of the insane, and on many other jobs and in many other places, the Anthology and the lyric poets of Greece have been my constant companions." --Kenneth Rexroth from the Foreword, Friend to the Beats

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