The Frost Place presents Formalist Track: Freedom and Form, a Poetry Seminar directed by Patrick Donnelly

The Frost Place presents Formalist Track: Freedom and Form, a 2021 Poetry Seminar directed by Patrick Donnelly, from August 1-6, 2021 online via Zoom.

From the organizers:

Now Accepting Applications!

As always, you’ll have access to instruction from our world-class faculty, focused attention on your work, and the vital exchanges of peers in workshop. Our goal is to support, refresh, and inspire you.

• Spend five days with a select community of poets exploring your artistic work in the context of a rich variety of poetry ancestors and contemporaries.
• Discover how poetic lineages and community can provide models, provocations and correctives to widen your thinking about your own efforts.
• Learn from a distinguished and accomplished faculty how poets choose, imitate, enter into dialogue with, and sometimes argue with the work of our poetic ancestors and contemporaries.

The Seminar schedule features a daily presentation/discussion exploring aspects of craft and technique, an afternoon workshop of participants’ poems or individual, virtual meetings with faculty, and an evening reading, some by faculty poets and others featuring participants

Formalist Track: Freedom and Form

Form is enjoying a robust comeback, with poets writing now not just in received forms like sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, ghazals, haiku, tanka (as well as free verse, itself a form), but also in a broad array of exciting new forms including golden shovels, bops, duplexes, syncopated sonnets, and more.

At the Poetry Seminar, we’re interested in form as a way to connect contemporary poets with the most ancient tools of our art, and especially with form’s flexibility to be adapted in ways that only the future can imagine. Learn more about the Formalist Track.

The opportunity to discuss a full-length manuscript is also available.

Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019), Jesus Said (a chapbook from Orison Books, 2017), Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012, a Lambda Literary Award finalist), and The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press). With his spouse Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. The translations in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, from the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award, and a 2019 residency at the Gloucester Writers Center. Donnelly was 2015 – 2017 poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Register here: https://frostplace.org/index.php/programs/poetry-seminar/