Northeast Poetry Center Announces Summer Workshops
The Northeast Poetry Center’s College of Poetry has announced two workshops to be offered during the summer term to run from July 9 until August 27. Each workshop will meet for two hours a week during the eight week course in the rear room behind Utopian Direction Books and Art at 7 West Street in Warwick. Tuition for each is $150. Enrollees are regarded as “guest poets,” and workshops are presented in a casual and open manner designed to be useful for writers of all levels of experience.
The Saturday morning course, entitled "The Poet’s Tool-Box: Figures of Speech and Thought," will meet from 10 am -12 noon. This group, led by William Seaton, will focus on the use of rhetorical figures, traditionally considered a distinguishing mark of poetry. Literary language is always “troping,” twisting ordinary verbal usage to obtain new meanings and new effects, to increase precision and to express new ideas. This workshop will provide the poet with a powerful “tool-box” of devices used by all writers of every age. Participants will enlarge their own repertoire as they study the works of past poets and use this knowledge in their own poetic practice.
Seaton is the author of Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems and Tourist Snapshots. His Dada Poems from the German is forthcoming from Nirala. Seaton’s poetry, reviews, translations, and essays have recently appeared in Poetry Flash, Chiron Review, Adirondack Review, Gander Press Review, Burp, Maintenant and Chronogram. Active in poetry performance all his life, he has read in Budapest and Kathmandu and, for over seventeen years, has directed the Poetry on the Loose Reading/Performance Series. He has taught at Long Island University and, as an adjunct, at many area institutions. Seaton posts five essays, literary and familiar, every month at williamseaton.blogspot.com.
The afternoon workshop, meeting from 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm is called "Writing from the Heart: How Personal is Too Personal." Donna Reis will lead a consideration of questions such as these: While narrators must give something of themselves, how much is too much? Do writers always divulge something personal whether they seem to tell all, coyly hint at the truth, or write in another person’s voice such as in a “dramatic monologue”? The class will explore twenty poets who’ve mastered confession and disguise, emotion and distance and will discuss their different levels of personal involvement and the strategies they used to reveal or not reveal. Each discussion will be followed by a writing exercise where students will practice the techniques discussed.
Reis is co-editor and contributor to the anthology, Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews and author of Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, Chance of a Ghost, and the forthcoming Killer Verse: Poems of Mayhem and Murder. Reis received her Master of Arts Degree in Creative Writing at The City College, City University of New York in 2002.
For further information or to register for a course, call William Seaton at 845-294-8085 or write This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .