Dear Friend of Poetry,
Galway Kinnell once remarked that he had been introduced at a poetry reading as “a living American poet.” The remark, while funny, is also sadly indicative of the distance between most Americans and poetry. I didn’t really begin to write—and I often still can’t get myself down to business—until I felt connected: now, to a few women who write together one or two days a month and, at the end of the day, share what we’ve written. Poets Forum, held October 16 to 18 in New York City, invites you to be part of that conversation, that ineffable web of encouragement, information, and inspiration, to be among the “living poets.”
If we’re lucky, those October days will be crisp and clear. You may sniff something new in the air: the possibility of openness and a shift in what we see. Certainly American poetry has changed in the past ten years, changes addressed and reflected in the cutting-edge discussions and readings that take place at Poets Forum. Audre Lorde said, “It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.”
Once, when I was teaching in the Poets-in-the-Schools program, I asked a group of fourth graders that had been writing poems for several days, “So what is a poem?” Everyone grew respectfully thoughtful, until one voice popped out: “I don’t know what a poem is, but it makes you shut up.”
Come to Poets Forum to be part of that silence from which a poem occasionally blooms like a rose.
Sincerely,
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