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.

Poems In Notebook Form


Poems In Notebook Form

I have been keeping notebooks for as long as I can remember, and I have learned in recent years that most poets keep them. These are not journals. They do not record the activities of our days nor often our thoughts about them. They are small or large, soft-bound and hard, lined and unlined, locked but most often not. Into them go the images, bits of overheard speech, "notes toward poems," odd things learned in a day, lines of poetry by others, possible epigraphs, lists of words jotted for this or that reason, words loved, words for green or some other color, synonyms, antonyms, short descriptions of things seen, verbal photographs, and even sketches, and even small maps and postage stamps and things cut from mailed envelopes. Sometimes these notebooks start resembling something else: aphorisms, a play, a film script. The poet develops a "form" for writing in the notebook. And every so often, in the notebook itself begins a poem. Studying notebooks, I began to wonder if some kind of form suggested itself by means of these notes. And upon reading certain poets, Edmond Jabès and Anna Kamienska among them, I thought to compost in the notebook form. Here are some links to works:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/180080

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/239348

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/239350

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247280

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180033

After looking at these, try to compose a poem in the form of a notebook and/or of notebook entries. The lines might be long (mostly) or broken by shorter lines. There may be a symbol of simply white
space between the sections or passages. The poem might include some quotes or not. Some lists or not. Think of making a poem in the shape and form of a notebook entry.



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