Events, Etc.
Announcements, Awards
- Camera Obscura was one of three finalists for best poetry book of 2008 by a San Diego poet, as determined by the San Diego Book Awards Association.
- “Feeling for the First Time the Guy Isn’t Worthy of Her,” a poem in Camera Obscura, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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Events, Lectures, Readings
1 June 2008:
Harry Griswold will be the featured reader at the monthly literary series hosted by Poets, Inc and the Escondido Arts Partnership. The session takes place at the Municipal Art Gallery, 142 West Grand Avenue, Escondido, CA. An informal reception begins at 12:30 p.m., and the reading starts at 1:00.
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Workshop: The Pleasures of Poetry
This is everything I’ve learned: Poetry is made of words — just enough, well-chosen, well-placed. Tools can be taught, to enhance sounds and images, but for a poem to work a piece of the poet has to reach the page, something real from where the outer world touches the poet’s peculiar inner being. The point is to recreate that experience in the reader. Faking it won’t work. It may take a poet a long time to embrace this truth, and even then making poems won’t get easier. Of course, the best teacher of all is good poems.
—Harry Griswold, on the art of writing poetry
Harry’s long-running workshop, “The Pleasures of Poetry,” focuses on reading and writing poetry in a contemporary American voice.
Semester sessions begin in September and February, meet for up to 12 weeks, and conclude with a public reading at the end of each term. Meetings take place on Tuesdays from noon till 3:00 pm in Solana Beach, CA and are open to experienced poets by invitation or application.
Please contact Harry about the application procedure.
Assigned Readings:
Since reading good poems is a prerequisite to writing them, readings are assigned, drawn mainly from a selected anthology. The compilation chosen for the fall 2008 workshop will be announced soon.
Assigned readings during the spring 2008 workshop were drawn from Poets of the New Century, second edition, edited by Roger Weingarten and Richard M. Higgerson, and published by David R. Godine, 2003.
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Recommended Reading:
The following anthologies were used during previous workshops and continue as recommended reading:
- The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Sue Ellen Thompson, Autumn House Press, 2005
- The Face of Poetry, edited by Zack Rogow, University of California Press, 2005
- The Pittsburgh Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Ed Ochester and Peter Oresick, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993
- American Poetry Now, edited by Ed Ochester, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007 (a newer anthology, which replaces the one listed immediately above)
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Workshop Models:
Among the many writers whose works have been used as models in the workshop are Bob Hicock, Stephen Dunn, and Joseph Millar. Books of note by these poets include:
- Bob Hicok: This Clumsy Living, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
- Stephen Dunn: New and Selected Poems 1974-1994,
W.W. Norton, 1994
- Joseph Millar: Fortune, Eastern Washington University Press, 2007
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