PHYLLIS BECK KATZ, POET
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​The Still Puddle Poetry Group

4/10/2019

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Born out of the course I taught with Donald Sheehan  (see my blog “ Finding Poetry,”) Deming Holleran, one of our students, and I formed a poetry workshop. This monthly workshop met regularly for twenty-one years.  We often gathered at Deming’s Hanover home and named our group Still Puddle because as Deming told us, the Holleran lap pool was “puddle -sized compared  to the real “Still Pond” that was her mother’s. During our years as a poetry group we published two books of four poems each from our group: The Still Puddle Poets 2006, and  The Still Puddle Poets New Poems, 2008,  and many of us have also produced books of our own.  Later we met at my Norwich home or at Nancy Crumbine’s.
 
The format of the workshop was to send our poems out before we met, so that would already have responded to them.  This worked very well, though inevitably some of us did not have time to send our poems before the meeting. Still, when poems were sent before we met, each of us was able to read a poem that we had already created, and others would have already commented on them, and this made for a very good critique for each poet.  This is my favorite type of workshop!
 
Sadly, as time went by, our lives changed.  I needed  to look after my husband and Deming was in Florida during the winter. We met when we could, but when my husband died, and I decided to move to Northampton, it was clear that Still Puddle would not continue. As Deming commented of the last of Still Puddle,  we had had “a good run for our money.”

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    Phyllis Katz: My Blog.

    This Blog begins with a description of my development as a poet, and goes on to discuss my teaching with Donald Sheehan, long-time director of The Frost Place. In subsequent entries I describe the summer programs at The Frost Place and The Fine Arts Work Center and discuss the reading and writing of poems.

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