Program founder Ellen Bryant Voigt with fellow poet and faculty member Heather McHugh (photo undated)
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Warren Wilson alumna Marcia Pelletiere (poetry, ’93) and her a cappella group “The Accidentals” have recorded a number of poem-songs that fit verse to music.
Visit their website to listen to “The Mermaid,” with lyrics from the poem, “Concerto” by Eleanor Wilner, along with songs based on poems by e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, and others.
Alumni Geoff Kronik’s (fiction, ’12) piece appears in the 2012 “Howlympics” column at HowlRound: A Journal of the Theater Commons.
My Olympic History
It was 1968, and in the underoxygenated heights of Mexico City, sprinters rocketed, marathoners gasped, Bob Beamon soared, and Fosbury flopped. At six years old, watching my first Olympics on my parents’ black-and-white televison, I was as captivated by athletics as I was ignorant of political gestures like the famous black power salute. I was also ignorant of the Games’ quadrennial calendar: my father traumatized me with news of a mandatory wait until 1972, which seemed as distant to me as 1984 did in Orwell’s time.
When the Munich games finally arrived, ignorance of political action was no longer possible. I saw the grainy death-mask photo that has become the face of that Olympiad, and I heard Jim McKay’s elegiac reporting that so contrasts with the shrillness of news today. 1972’s ten-year-old was less assaulted by media than today’s kids are, and I thus had a better chance of intact innocence, but I understood something of timeless horror had occurred. And yet, at an impressionable age, I did not conflate the Games with evil...[Keep Reading]…
Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03): Patrick’s poem, “Which Makes Me, I Guess, the Muddy Colorado” appears in the current issue of Plume:
Which Makes Me, I Guess, The Muddy Colorado
…carved with the curious legend of my youth…
— Stanley Kunitz
What we learn from most pornography is
that a great many primates so professionally beautiful
as to make one’s teeth ache
have had congress with a great many other such primates,
though only a few seemed really that into it.
What only a specialized, expensive or amateur category of porn
reveals is that occasionally one of the immortals will,
as in Cavafy’s poem, condescend to love up
an ordinary person. Even the Grand Canyon
was full before it was empty: over the eons...[Keep Reading]…
Patrick is the author of Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Stahlecker Selections)
Faculty member Brooks Haxton’s memorable closing remarks from the summer 2012 MFA residency:
It’s a pleasure to celebrate with you the accomplishment of this graduating class, and we all appreciate it that the families and friends of graduates have traveled so far to join us. You visitors, who have been there for these writers with support in spirit and in substance for a long time, now, by being here, help the rest of us to appreciate what this work involves. Thank you for coming.
Writing is a mysterious business for the people who do it, and for the people who watch it from the sidelines, it looks even more mysterious. Most of us as writers spend long hours alone, mumbling to ourselves. We mumble, some of us, without moving our lips. Many of us, I can see, are mumbling now. Without making a sound, we mumble. It’s worse than that. We listen to what we’re mumbling. We go into a little trance; and we write out what we said. Then, we ask people to believe we were inspired, and to make us believe it.
But when we read these same pages over to ourselves alone, we cannot believe that any self-respecting person wrote this garbage. So, we start mumbling the revisions, and, despite recent experience, we listen to ourselves again, as if we were the oracle at Delphi.
Warren Wilson faculty member Gabrielle Calvocoressi recently read at the 2012 Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies Summer Workshops.
Gabrielle is the author of Apocalyptic Swing: Poems
In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Warren Wilson faculty member Liam Callanan searches Paris for sites from classic children’s books:
THE FIRST remarkable sight we caught in Paris was our own 4-year-old daughter. Standing on a sidewalk in the Marais, she looked around, hands on hips, and said: “I think I’ve been here.”
She hadn’t—we monitor her play dates more carefully than that—but it was a delight to realize what made her think so: books...[Keep Reading]…
The New York Times’ list of Favorite Snacks of the Great Writers
“Walt Whitman began the day with oysters and meat, while Gustave Flaubert started off with what passed for a light breakfast in his day: eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate…”
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons