Oct. 15 to 18, 2009

This year's participating poets

 

 

About

Festival Schedule:  Thurs (15th)Fri (16th)Sat (17th)Sun (18th)View all

A Few Words about the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project

The Massachusetts Poetry Festival is now in its second year. The brainchild of the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project, the Festival was rapidly brought to life by Michael Ansara of MassPOP,  LZ Nunn, the Director of COOL, Paul Marion, UMass Lowell, Charles Coe, Mass. Cultural Council, and Nicco Mele of EchoDitto with the support of UVAS, Bootstrap Press and the Lowell Poetry Network. Now the Festival has over 50 official poetry partners and a growing number of sponsors. Former U.S. Poet Lauriat, Robert Pinsky is the honorary Chair of the Festival.

The Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project (MassPOP) is new program to connect poets and poetry with larger audiences. The project grew out of roundtables with poets in every part of the state to explore that condition of poetry in Massachusetts. Those roundtables were a collaborative effort between MassPOP, the Mass Cultural Council and MassHumanities.

The purpose of MassPOP is to create resources to aid and support the Massachusetts poetry community, to reconnect poetry to more mainstream culture, to create new audiences for poetry and to organize the poetry community throughout the state. The initial MassPOP proposal (which you can read below) lists as its first goals:

  • the creation of a database that will include Massachusetts poets, presenters, writing programs, venues and links to various technical assistance resources for poets.
  • the creation of a Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
  • testing how to support poets to take poetry into the community, the schools, the libraries, senior centers and workplaces.

MassPOP is proud of the start we have made.  The Festival has been created. This fall we will be conducting our first community residences for two poets in the North Allston neighborhood of Boston. But as much as we have been able to do, far more remains to be done.

In the coming months we hope to formalize MassPOP with a large advisory board of poets from across the state and with a working executive committee, use the Allston program as a pilot and hopefully spread it to new areas of the state.

For more information about MassPOP you can contact Chloe Garcia-Roberts at chloe@masspoetry.org .

Download the Full Draft of the MassPOP Mission: poetryprojectdraft