a series in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival
Joan Houlihan, on 'What Is Poetry?'
This is the second installment in a series brought to you by Read Write Poem in partnership with the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which is being held Oct. 15-18 in Lowell and various cities across Massachusetts. Visit the organization’s website for a complete schedule of events, to watch videos of poets performing at the 2008 festival, for ticket information and more.
For this series, featured readers at the festival were asked to answer the question, “What is poetry?” Below is Joan Houlihan’s response. She created a wordle using Shakespeare’s poem “Who Is Silvia?” and substituted the question, “What Is Poetry?”
We invite comments of all forms on this post, especially poems written using the words from Houlihan’s wordle.
Joan Houlihan is founding director of the Concord Poetry Center and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences. She is author of three books, most recently, The Us, from Tupelo Press (2009). Her other books are The Mending Worm (2006) winner of the New Issues Press Green Rose Award and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (2003). Her work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Fulcrum, Pleiades, Passages North, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Arts and VOLT and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press) and in The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press).
Houlihan teaches in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing low-residency program in Cambridge, Mass., and Columbia University’s MFA program in New York.
Houlihan will be reading as part of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in the New Works Reading, Saturday, Oct. 17, at 4:30 p.m. in Lowell. She is also participating in The Director’s Cut, Saturday, Oct. 17, at 1 p.m. Learn more about the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival by visiting the festival’s site.
What a wonderful wordle! Perfect for the sonnet.Think we will use this as a prompt next week. Anyone courageous enough to have a crack at a sonnet join the sonneteers over at Form
and Structure in Poetry at New Formalism . We are a small but eccentric group of pedants and on occasion we are friendly to each other.Cynthia Sonneteer Extraordinaire will be featuring soon!
I would love to hear Joan Houlihan read but when you live at the bottom of the world these events are not a consideration unfortunately.
That’s a fantastic idea, Rallentanda!
Rallentanda replied:
October 7th, 2009 at 1:56 am
I trust you are burning the midnight oil, quill in snow flecked mittened hand scratching out a sonnet in your cold garret to the strains of ‘La Boheme’
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
October 7th, 2009 at 10:16 am
That’s not exactly what I did last night, but I am reading “A Formal Feeling Comes,” edited by Annie Finch. And I read a chapbook of sonnets — didn’t like that particular collection very much.
Hi, guys!
Jill and I will be at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and I’ve been so delighted to get sneak peaks here.
Let us know if you’ll also be there. Maybe we can have a RWP coffee break or something!
Let’s use the messaging feature of RWP to connect so we don’t hijack the comments of this piece. Thanks!
WHERE ARE THE COMMENTS?
Where are the comments? whence come they?
That so few bloggers post some?
Kind, wise, or dull are they,
with avatars to host them,
with pseudonyms that ghost them:
who is this Sylvia anyway? Virtual
beauty on no earth dwelling; rather
our cyberspace grace, im-mortal
in the polls, the groups, the forums.
I love Wordles! What a great response to the question.
This makes me wish SO MUCH! I could be in Massachusetts for Poetry Festival. It is such a poetry-rich geography. I lust after that geography and the Wordle just makes my lust stronger, zinging across my spirit like the wild thing it is.
Do you people who are attending know how blessed you are?
About a hundred years ago I wrote this http://bit.ly/XoP2c trying to my own question which is of course the same question. Cool wordle! Gonna have a crack at the mini challenge below. ’bout time I got my feet wet round here, and as it is National Poetry Day here in the UK tomorrow the timing is perfect.
rallentanda replied:
October 7th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
You’ve won yourself a fan with this poem…hilarious..I’m jealous!
I must commend you folks, Inhabitants of fair old mass who seem to live in grace
Excelling far beyond the dull and mortal earth where I dwell.
While swains here sing admired songs, they have to do with trucks
And beer and flags and football (lend me blindness of a Sunday afternoon), and women
Well –endowed with cheating genes. There’s mighty little poetry
If you don’t bring your own. I guess that’s fair and can’t be helped, but
I’d raise holy hell to get a thing like that in my corner of the universe.
rallentanda replied:
October 7th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
oh,I don’t know..Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman live down the road..maybe you could start up a poetry group together!