Martha Rhodes at the Frost Place:

Martha’s workshops are very generative.  She works with participants on poems that they have submitted for the workshop, giving ample time to each person’s work. She encourages positive comments and suggestions for each poem. I particularly like the way she asks her pupils to play with their own work. For example, she will suggest taking the end of a poem and making it the beginning, or changing a poem in couplets to one long stanza. She asks the writer to edit carefully and to crop words and lines that are extraneous.  Each of her workshops also provides a prompt to write from in class; these are often the seeds of poems to work on for the next class or after the Frost Place Conference.

Martha provides a comfortable and stimulating atmosphere. Her expertise as poet, teacher, editor, and publisher inform and enrich her workshops.

See: http://martharhodespoet.com/

I’ve been thinking about what makes a good poetry workshop.  Here are a few ideas.

A good workshop should have:

1)    generative prompts that the leader sends out before the workshop

2)    assignments of model poems to be read and discussed in class

3)    a packet of poems by all the participants submitted in advance of the workshop

4)    plenty of time during the workshop  to read each participant’s poem twice and discuss its strengths and make positive suggestions about possible changes

5)    time to revise built into assignments, so that poems return to a later gathering of the workshop for another reading

6)    a leader who can facilitate ongoing positive and fruitful discussion of workshop poems

I’m sure I’ve missed points that you think are important and would welcome your comments and suggestions.  In my next entry I will describe several workshops I have taken at The Frost Place or the FAWC.

“The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown was founded in 1968 by 
a group of artists, writers and patrons, including Fritz Bultman, Salvatore and Josephine Del Deo, Stanley Kunitz, Phil Malicoat, Robert Motherwell, Myron 
Stout, Jack Tworkov and Hudson D. Walker, among others. The founders envisioned a place in Provincetown, the country’s most enduring artists’ colony, where artists and writers could live and work together in the early phase of their careers. The founders believed that the freedom to pursue creative work within a community of peers is the best catalyst for artistic growth. The Work Center has dedicated itself to this mission for over 40 years.”  From the FAWC website: http://web.fawc.org/.

I was urged to try to the FAWC by fellow poets in Vermont.  FAWC offers weekly courses from June through August for poets and artists at a compound designed by the founders to provide classrooms, studios, apartments, a computer room, an auditorium, and a gallery. A typical week will include workshops in poetry, fiction, memoir, oil painting, printing, and photography. For four nights a resident writer and a resident artist give presentations. On the fifth night the student writers give a reading and preceded by a tour of the studios to look at student work. This blending of writing and art in the same facility is a special strength of this program!  I have loved the connections I have found in discussions with working artists and writers.

The poetry classes are either three or four hours each morning – each poet/teacher’s course has a different focus, but all provide the opportunity for feedback on work submitted and opportunity for generating now work.  Afternoons provide ample time for revising or writing new assignments. I have studied with Vijay Sheshadri, Henri Cole, Marie Howe, Nick Flynn, and Alan Shapiro. Each of the classes was excellent.  I have come way from each class with better understanding of my own work through the works of my classmates and the wonderful guidance of the instructors.

Of course, not only is the program outstanding, the fact that the FAWC is located in the heart of Provincetown, a venue offering the excitement of that town of artists and writers, and the pleasures of summer in Cape Cod, including the beaches, dunes, the National Seashore is an irresistible draw. The town pulses with life!  While I am in residence there I begin each day with a bike ride from Pearl Street to Herring Cove. I go out early enough to avoid the congestion of vehicles and pedestrians that escalates as the day progresses.  Sometimes I bike to the National Seashore and ride on the trails there. These morning excursions provide both mental and physical exercise and ready me for a day of writing. 

Five years ago, at the advice of poet friends, I signed up for a poetry workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.  Going to the FAWC for a week of poetry has now become as necessary to me as breathing.  Two days ago I registered for my sixth workshop.  I will write more about this wonderful resource for writers and artists in my next entries. For the curious, check out: http://web.fawc.org/

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Poetry at The Frost Place, Franconia, NH

I always love going to The Frost Place. The farmhouse looks out at Mount Lafayette and a ridge of the White Mountains. The view is breathtaking. There was usually an afternoon free for hiking, biking, or sight seeing. The view is breathtaking. To be among other poets and be able to hear, read, and write poetry in this environment has always been the source for me of fresh creative work.

When I first attended the Frost Place Festival all events were held in or around the Poetry Barn.
Participants found their own housing at local B&B’s, Motels, or rented a local apartment for the week.  There was a lecture each morning in the Barn, followed by two workshop periods, each one with a different poet/teacher, a different group, and a different location. There were 8 to 10 participants in a workshop; everyone’s poem received two readings and a period followed of comments and suggestions.  Each evening there was a poetry reading by one or more of the teacher/poets; on the final evening there was a participant reading. The faculty had their own residence together. The program was blessed by having Donald Sheehan as its director for over twenty years. (see my Jan 12 entry.)

Some very significant and positive changes have been made to the program in recent years. Participants now choose one workshop and remain with that poet and group for the week. This has made for a significantly stronger program, because the group has a chance to cohere and develop and to understand each poet’s style and voice and see how the poet’s work changes and develops as the workshop proceeds.

Mornings begin with two lectures or presentations by workshop leaders. Workshops are held after lunch.  Equally important, the venue for The Conference on Poetry (as the Festival is now called) is now The White Mountain School (a fifteen minute drive from The Frost Place) where participants and leaders eat meals together and live in the dormitories together. Evening readings are still held in the Poetry Barn at The Frost Place. Martha Rhodes, established poet and Director and Founding Editor of Four Ways Books is the current director of the Frost Place, and she has helped to bring about these important changes.

I keep returning each summer to The Frost Place, confident that I will find new stimulation, new nourishment for my own work.  For more information: http://frostplace.org/

Teaching with Donald Sheehan

In 1994 Donald Sheehan, then a member of the English Department at Dartmouth College, asked me to join him in preparing a course to be given together for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth. Don’s idea was to design a course on ancient and modern lyric poetry that would focus on the links between the two eras. We did so together, and the course was so popular that we repeated it with variations at least three more times. Don knew how to bring students to poetry, to make it theirs,
whether it was the work of Sappho, Catullus, or Horace, or of Frost or Dickinson or Bishop. We would choose a focus theme and construct a syllabus.  One of our courses, for example, was called “Voices of the Past Made Present, Ancient Poets, Modern Echoes and included works by and about Vergil, Dante, Shelley, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and May Sarton.  For me the experience of teaching with Don was a unique privilege. Don, who died in 2010 was Executive Director of the Frost Place in Franconia for thirty years.  In fact, it was at his urging that I attended my first Frost Place Festival of Poetry in 1995. I have been attending Frost Place Festivals and Conferences ever since. 

What was unique about Don, and what made it so wonderful to teach with him was not only his connection of some of the leading American poets who came to read, lecture, and teach at the Frost Place at his invitation but also his ability to make these poets live in the hearts of others. From him I learned to appreciate and read a bouquet of modern poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Ellen Bryant Voigt, B.H. Fairchild, Robert Haas and James Hoch. But it was not only Don’s intimate knowledge of modern poets and their works that made him so memorable as a fellow teacher and as the director of a noted annual poetry conference. Don was Eastern Orthodox, an intense believer, who lived a truly Christian life.  His introductions each morning at the Frost Place Festival were memorable in their spirituality as well as their practical guidance.  Of listening to the poems of others, he advised:

“If you must make a flash choice between sympathy and intelligence, choose sympathy. Usually these fall apart—sympathy becoming a mindless ‘being nice’ to everyone, while intelligence becomes an exercise in contempt. But here’s the great fact of this Festival: as you come to care about another person’s art (and not your own), then your own art becomes mysteriously better.”

There is deep wisdom and truth in this advice, and, when followed, it  does transform one's art bringing it away from the self, giving it greater depth and connecting to the traditions that link all poets and poems.

            Quoted by Hilary Mullins in her article “The Transfiguration of Donald Sheehan,” Numero Cinq Magazine, Vol 4, No. 8, August 2013, http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/08/06/the-transfiguration-of-don-sheehan-essay-hilary-mullins/.

After Don died, I wrote a poem about him “Elegy for a Good Man” which is published in my first book

All Roads Go Where They Will, Antrim House Books, 2010.

The poem concludes:

            He knew the best bards of every age

            and hosted the most successful poets

            of our time at annual Frost Festivals,

            but still he asked them to remember they were there

            as colleagues among all the writers who attended,

            despite rewards and accolades they’d garnered,

            and when each festival commenced,

            he spoke of love and generosity, of the vital need

            to find the unique beauty in another’s work,

            to value it as if it were our own – his legacy for us.

Although I have spent most of my teaching years as a Classics professor at a number of colleges and universities, I had a  fifteen year stint as a high school teacher.  I was hired by Miss Porter's to teach English and did so for seven years. When the Classics teacher retired, I took over that program for eight years.  The English program offered American Literature to juniors and British Literature to seniors.  Both courses were chronological surveys. British Literature, for example, went from Chaucer to Tom Stoppard. It was teaching these survey courses that reinforced my knowledge of the great American and British poets; as a result, poems I had known but not internalized, became a part of my poetic repertory and have remained so.  It is as if I have a permanent library of poems stacked in shelves in my head,  a treasure of forms and rhythms, and of poetic styles.  In short, it was teaching high school English that reinforced my college major in English and prepared the foundation  I needed when I began to write my own poems. The iambic pentameters of Shakespeare and Frost echoed in many of my early poems, and I find that I still often think and write in pentameters.

I discovered poetry in a senior English class at Hamden High School in Hamden, CT. The teacher introduced us to Shakespeare's sonnets, to T.S. Eliot and to Yeats.  I loved the sonnets and wrote several of my own, now lost, I'm afraid.  I was overpowered by "The Wasteland" and the "Four Quartets," and by "Sailing to Byzantium."  When I began my studies at Wellesley College, I quickly decided to major in English. My knowledge and love of poetry expanded greatly during my four college years, but I did no creative work, wrote not a single poem there.

My studies as an English major earned me my first two jobs, the first as an editorial correspondent at the National Geographic Society, the second as an editorial secretary at Allyn and Bacon Publishers.  These positions offered little opportunity for creative work, and I left the publishing world with no regrets. Newly married, my husband I traveled to London where he became an Assistant Registrar at the National Heart Hospital and I began studies at University College, London that would eventually lead to an MA in Classics from UC Los Angeles, and a PhD in Classics at Columbia University. My doctoral work focused on Greek poetry, and I wrote my PhD thesis on the choral lyric poet Pindar. I spent the succeeding forty three years teaching Classics at various schools, gradually shifting from Greek to Latin poetry. It was while teaching Classics at Dartmouth College that I met Donald Sheehan, then Director of the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. This meeting, and the courses Don and I taught together were the source of my rediscovery of the joys of reading and writing poetry.