Massachusetts Poetry Festival & Other Programs
What’s a trait you really admire in another person? I suspect most of us would rank the ability to laugh at one’s self right up there with generosity and kindness. Besides, laughter is catching — so we all get to benefit.
Alice Kociemba
Alice Kociemba earned the admiration of a room full of people when she read her prize-winning poem in Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Contest at the recent Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
Last year Mass LEAP, the youth programming arm of Mass Poetry, attracted 16 teams with over 100 young people participating in a poetry program called Louder than a Bomb (LTAB). This year the enthusiasm for the nascent program has almost doubled across the state, with 24 teams and close to 180 teens participating in free workshops, presentations and poetry slams.
Jack Scully
Thanks to Jack Scully for the following report:
Here are three more responses to Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2013 — by DaQuan Cook and thank-yous by Tony Toledo and Jade Sylvan. Plus at the end of the responses there is a fantastic photo from the festival. Enjoy!
Here is the second of our stories about reactions to the festival, with Tom Daley, Laurin Macios, Alice Kociemba, Joey Gould, Claire Keyes and Cindy Veach.
The next few stories are going to be reflections on this year’s Massachusetts Poetry festival, including reflections of what people loved about the event. But first, just in case you want to know a scientific measure of the event, here is a report from the festival co-founder Michael Ansara:
Relive the Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2013 through the responses of others to the event. More responses will be coming, including Tom Daley, Alice Kociemba, Laurin Macios, Joey Gould, Jade Sylvan and Tony Toledo. But if you are feeling down after having a wonderful weekend, here is a quick pick-me-up of remembrance with Lloyd Schwartz, Dawn Paul, Kevin Carey, Don McLagan, and Martha Carlson-Bradley.
Reading last night at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival were the following:
Here is a poem by each one: [Read more...]
Did you miss the opening day at the Mass Poetry Festival? Then you missed readings, workshops, music, belly dancers, performance poetry, flash mob singing. Poetry in a museum, poetry in cafes, poetry in churches. Poetry and global warming, poetry and war, poetry and nature, poetry and the inner lives of object. A play about Emily Dickerson. Ballads, blues and poetry. Dancers dialoging with poetry and books.
Tracy K. Smith
And you missed wonderful food on a wonderfully sunny day, in a wonderful cobblestone-lovely town.
In the evening featured poets had the audience rolling in the aisles with laughter and awe-struck with mingling of cosmic vastness and intimacy. Nick Flynn imbued physics with the wonder of a child’s mind as it accepts the implausible situations of cartoons, and he gave voice to creatures like bees. Jill McDonough gave life to human foibles and cross-cultural misunderstandings that nevertheless show generosity of spirit. And Tracy K. Smith meditatively blends science and science fiction as they illuminate her memory of her father.
Jill McDonough
There’s still today and tomorrow for experiencing the vast world of the Mass Poetry Festival.The Saturday feature poets are Pulitzer Prize winner Sharon Olds, Terrance Hayes, and Eduardo C. Corral. And Sunday’s features are Martin Espada, John Murillo, Amanda Torres, Arthur Sze, Gail Mazur, Erica
Nick Flynn
Funkhouser, Kevin Goodan, and Yusef Komunyaaka.
See you there?
If you want to get a feel for the Festival before you come to Salem this weekend, look at what people said about it last year.
Jill McDonough, Pushcart winner and a feature poet for this year, compares the festival favorably to the AWP Convention.
J.D. Scrimgeour, who is a poet and teaches at Salem State University, gives a wonderful sense of the camaraderie at the festival.Richard Hoffman, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, gives us the essence of his presentation on the state of contemporary poetry.
The Morning After describes the exhilaration and wonderful exhaustion the first morning after the festival is over.
Come and see for yourself what the festival holds for you!
