The following is an interview with Patrick Donnelly, the Director of the Advanced Seminar program for the Frost Place. Donnelly
is the author of THE CHARGE (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and NOCTURNES OF THE BROTHEL OF RUIN, forthcoming from Four Way Books. He is a current Associate Editor of POETRY INTERNATIONAL, a Contributing Editor of TRANS-PORTAL (www.transtudies.org), and a former Associate Editor (1999 – 2009) at Four Way Books. In 2008 he was a Resident Fellow and workshop leader at the Frost Place’s 30th Anniversary Festival and Conference on Poetry. Register for the Advanced Seminar here.
What is The Frost Place, and what does the setting offer the writer?
The Frost Place is a nonprofit educational center for poetry based at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire. We produce three poetry conferences each summer: The Conference on Poetry and Teaching, The Festival and Conference on Poetry, and the Advanced Seminar.
Frost lived in the farmhouse in Franconia for five years full-time, 1915 – 1920, and the nineteen following summers. In gathering there, we try to catch a bit of Frost’s tailwind, and that of the many other fine poets who have lived in the house since the 1970s. In recent years our programs have met at the Frost house and the Henry Holt Barn for morning presentations and evening readings, but at other local venues for workshops and meals. This allows us to enjoy both the history and inspiration of the Frost property, and the creature comforts of modern facilities for our concentrated work and some of our socializing.
As a special treat during the Seminar this year, participants will have cocktails and dinner one evening at the Frost museum, including a tour of the private parts of the house led by K. A. (Katie) Hays, 2011 Poet in Residence at The Frost Place.
When is the Seminar?
The Advanced Seminar dates are August 7 – 12, and we’re accepting applications until July 15th. The Conference on Poetry and Teaching—of interest to teachers interested in incorporating poetry in the classroom—will be June 26 – 30, and the Festival and Conference on Poetry will be July 7 – 13.
The relationship between the Festival and Conference and the Advanced Seminar has traditionally been that poets attend the F&C one year, and then the Seminar in a later year, as the Seminar is for poets who are well acquainted with workshop format and who have been working at their craft for a while. (Participants don’t need to have attended the F&C to come to the Seminar, but many have, and we also have many returning Seminar attendees.) Some Seminar attendees have published in journals and/or published books; some have advanced degrees in creative writing or related fields. So though we think of the Seminar as a venue for skilled and experienced poets, in no way is the Festival and Conference a lesser offering: the faculties of all three conferences are well-known poets and superb teachers, and offer the same engaged attention to participants.
As of this writing, there are a few spots available in each conference.
Why did you decide to make “Choosing Your Poetry Parents” the theme for the Seminar?
The Advanced Seminar has a history of focusing on “poetry ancestors”— you know, the “great shades” and still-living poets in whose footsteps we try to walk as contemporary poets. When I came on as director I thought it would be a good idea to continue a conversation about the poets we choose for models. It’s an organizing principle that allows us to focus on how important craft strategies are deployed in a variety of poets’ work. We all have models—nobody writes a poem out of nothing—but sometimes those models aren’t explicitly conscious, or we’d have difficulty articulating exactly what craft strategies we took from which poets. So we’re going to try to make those choices conscious during the Seminar. And more than that—Dr. Phil often asks a question that I think is useful in a lot of contexts, which is “How’s that working for you?” Because taking a model might mean adopting that poet’s weaknesses as well as strengths, we’re going to ask whether the models we took in the past are serving us well in the present, or whether we need to make some adjustments. That doesn’t mean we’ll be throwing our old poetry parents under the bus (to use another Dr. Phil expression—what’s come over me?) but it may mean we’ll reappraise our poetry family and add to it.
What unique features make this Seminar inviting?
Firstly, the setting is purely beautiful and historically significant. We sit on Frost’s porch looking out over the daylilies to the changing light on the mountains, and during readings in the Henry Holt Barn the photos of the many Poets in Residence who have also worked in Frost’s house look at us, and we at them. There has been a Poet in Residence at The Frost Place every summer since 1977, including Major Jackson, B. H. Fairchild, Katha Pollitt, Robert Hass, William Matthews, Cleopatra Mathis, Mark Halliday, Mary Ruefle, Mark Cox, James Hoch, Adrienne Su, and Laura Kasischke. The presence and participation of these writers adds tremendously to each of the summer programs.
The Frost Place is a place where important artistic work has been done, and will continue to be done. At the same time, it’s a casual and non-hierarchical place, where poets at all stages of their lives as artists can enter into easy conversation. I have a very good memory of sitting late at night on the Frost porch with Ilya Kaminsky, having a wine-warmed argument about George Herbert. Out of that conversation, Ilya and I have gone on to work on various projects together; it’s that kind of place.
Besides what is listed on the Frost Place Web pages, tell us a little about each of the three faculty members.
Well, besides directing the conference I’m also a faculty member and workshop leader. A former student recently thanked me for
my “ruthless honesty,” and it is true that one of the things you will always get from me is a frank discussion, because that’s how artists who respect one another should talk. We begin with an assumption of each other’s talent and potential, and have a lively conversation as between peers at different levels. I do quibble with “ruthless,” though, because I always want to send poets away from my workshop excited and inspired to jump right back into their work.
Teaching with the Seminar also gives me an opportunity to address, in the morning group discussion I’ll lead, a craft topic I think has become very important recently in the larger poetry community. By this I mean the idea of “character” in poetry, the sense of poem’s speaker and other characters AS characters, differentiated from the author though perhaps sharing some of the author’s characteristics and history. This is a way of looking at characters in a way analogous to fiction, films, plays, operas, etc. Readers sometimes don’t credit poets with the same ability to make up the brilliant, peculiar, seemingly real stuff that they assume other writers are capable of. This gets both readers and poets in trouble, so I’d like to push back against that notion a little.
Adrian Blevins is a gutsy poet who isn’t afraid to tell it like she sees it, on or off the page, also one of the smartest, warmest, funniest people on the planet and an extremely skilled and popular teacher with two-plus decades of teaching experience. She’s important among women poets, it seems to me, for the unsentimental, messy, heart-breaking centrality of children and motherhood in many of her poems. Adrian is the first reader of my own early drafts, and I would trust her with my life.
Though I haven’t yet met Blas Falconer personally, I asked him to join the Seminar faculty because of the amazing, brave, musical and truth-telling poems in his books The Perfect Hour and A Question of Gravity and Light, and because participants who went to the Festival and Conference on Poetry a few years back told me he is a wonderful teacher and person. An interesting thing—though Blas’s poems are perfectly clear, there’s a mystery at the center of many of them that throws off tremendous energy, and that’s another reason I wanted him to join our conversation.
Special guests Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dawn Potter and K. A. Hays will also visit the Seminar to give a talk or a reading or both. All in all, the faculty and visitors represent both high accomplishment and a diversity of poetic approaches.
I keep using the word “conversation”—I want for the Seminar to be one of the those charmed times, which don’t happen often enough, where we sit up late with the candles guttering, talking about important things with real people, real artists, who say stuff you couldn’t have predicted in a million years.
What should a writer expect to accomplish during the seminar?
The heart of the Seminar experience is the workshop, in which a small group of participants will meet with a faculty member for three hours every day. It’s an opportunity to give and receive close, engaged reading and revision suggestions, as well as to participate in the kind of conversations about poetry—our own and other people’s—that will inspire and sustain our future work. Though there are lots of social opportunities at the Seminar, as well as some downtime to enjoy the gorgeous White Mountains, the 5-½ day schedule is full. So the Seminar isn’t so much a time to generate new writing (though you know poets do that, anyway, somehow, everywhere) as to recharge, connect with other poets, and add craft tools to the toolbox. People go away from The Frost Place having made personal and professional connections that last for decades.
Since this is an Advanced Seminar, what are the requirements for application?
We ask applicants to send three poems and a one-page cover letter with brief biographical note. You’ll find all the information about the Seminar here:
http://www.frostplace.org/html/seminar.html
…and about the other programs at The Frost Place here:
If you’re not sure if you’re right or ready for the Seminar, I encourage you to apply, and we’ll direct you to The Frost Place program that’s right for you.
What do you expect poets to enjoy most about the Seminar?
The people. I hope you will go away from the Seminar with new poetic strategies and a full tank of encouragement, but even more than that I hope you’ll leave with a sense of belonging to an ongoing literary tribe. A writer’s work is often solitary, as well as not well understood by non-writers, so we need to find the places where we can connect with people who do understand. It can mean the difference between going on to do the work we are meant to do, or not. When Emily Dickinson first sent Thomas Wentworth Higginson her poems, she wrote:
Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?
The Mind is so near itself – it cannot see, distinctly – and I have none to ask-
Should you think it breathed – and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude –
Every poet needs a reader who will pay close attention—years later Dickinson wrote Higginson “You were not aware that you saved my Life.” At The Frost Place every writer is a reader, and vice versa, and we come together to give each other the gift of our close attention.
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