Rhina Espaillat is a founding member and former director of the Powow River Poets. She writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Lyric, Poetry, Sparrow, Orbis, The Formalist, and The American Scholar, as well as some forty anthologies. Espaillat has eight poetry collections in print, including Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and most recently, Playing at Stillness. In 2004 she became the first winner of the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and César Sánchez Beras. That same year she also received the Dominican Republic’s Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education

How, when, and why did the Powow River Poets get started?

We began with a small nucleus of some five or six local poets in 1992, meeting at first in one another’s houses, and then in local cafes, then in the Newburyport Art Association and finally in the Newburyport Library once a month, to exchange poems with each other and trade comments and ideas. By then some of the earliest members had moved away or gone on to other interests, and new members had joined.

What was the purpose of the organization?

The chief purpose has always been the same: to get better at what we do by giving each other useful criticism. Additional purposes are the exchange among ourselves of such useful information as publication venues, contest news and so forth, and also the presentation of poetry to the reading public, especially but not exclusively in the local community, and the fostering and encouragement of local students. We run a free reading series that brings well-known poets to Newburyport to read every two months at Jabberwocky Books. We also present readings occasionally at other venues in and around Newburyport, individually or in small groups, often at events sponsored by other cultural groups in the area, such as the Newburyport Literary Festival, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the Whittier Home, museums, galleries and book stores. The person in charge of setting up those readings is currently Michael Cantor: you may want to contact him for details about that:  ( mcantor@prodigy.net  )

Has the purpose changed or expanded over the years? If so, why?

No, we’re still committed to improve as poets, and to serve the community by enriching its cultural and educational life to the extent that we can.

How does it support local poets?

By helping them to hone their craft, hear other poets and gain access to their books and recordings, and attempt new forms and techniques, such as polyphonic readings (readings by several voices), melopoeias (readings with musical backgrounds) and other combinations of two or more arts, including the visual and dramatic arts. I’m happy to report that the group has won a disproportionate number of national and international poetry awards, and has drawn attention and positive commentary from poets out of the area, including Dana Gioia, X. J. Kennedy and Lewis Turco. From eight to twelve of us attend the yearly West Chester Poetry Conference, the largest poetry conference in the country and the only one devoted specifically to the study of poetic craft. Almost all of us have published at least one book, and several have quite a few; a number have also published translations, both of the classics and from the work of contemporary foreign poets. 

How many members do you have? How does one become a member?

We currently have twenty-five active members, of whom some eighteen or nineteen attend every meeting. We’re not actively seeking new members, as that’s a large number, and we like to give each poet as much time as possible at each of our monthly meetings. Poets seeking membership are asked to visit a reading first, without any work to share, to see if the group seems right for his needs, and then, if he chooses, to ask Don Kimball   (  prisdon@comcast.net  ),  the current workshop time-keeper and head of the membership committee, about membership.

What are some of the more exciting things your organization has done in the years since it began?

In addition to the workshop meetings, the bi-monthly readings by guest poets are our most exciting activities. We have presented to the public readings by several former U. S. Poet Laureates, including William Jay Smith and Richard Wilbur, as well as dozens of poets celebrated nationally and internationally. We have taken part in civic events, appeared at the Firehouse Center for the Arts, the Actors’ Studio and other cultural centers, and consistently mentored the work of Newburyport High School’s outstanding creative writing group, Poetry Soup, at the invitation of its director, teacher Debbie Szabo. As individuals, of course, our members have also done quite a few exciting things.

Deborah Szabo adds:  The Powow Poets are at the core of a group of poets who serve as featured readers for Poetry Soup, the monthly poetry readings the kids hold at Newburyport High School. Several of the Powows have served as major inspiration for my students, especially, of course, Rhina, whom we fondly refer to as the “grandmother of Poetry Soup.”

What are your plans for the future?

We are considering, at the invitation of Newburyport Art Association Director Elena Bachrach and jointly with Debbie Szabo, the possibility of some shared activity bringing together the literary and the visual arts, and harnessing the talent of the area’s young people. Aside from this project, of course, we hope to continue doing what we’ve been doing so far, and whatever future challenges lead us to accomplish.

Szabo responds to what the Powow Poets are doing in this initiative:  The project Rhina mentions will launch in the fall. Students from my Creative Writing class will write dramatic monologues based on the art work being shown at the Newburyport Art Association. It was Rhina’s idea! Not sure yet how the Powows will fit in, but I’m hoping we can use poems they have written from the point of view of inanimate objects as models for my students to read and study before going to the Art Association to write their own.

For this article, we interviewed Joan Houlihan, founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.  Her most recent book of poetry is The Us (Tupelo Press), named as a “must read” book of 2009 by Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is also author of The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press, and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays. Her critical essays on contemporary poetry are archived online at bostoncomment.com. She is managing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. Joan has been a visiting professor in Columbia University’s graduate MFA Writing Program and Emerson College in Boston. She is on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also the founder and director of the Concord Poetry Center.

What are the Colrain Conferences and how long have they been going on?

The Colrain Conference is a weekend (three-day) program, held once a month, that focuses exclusively on poetry manuscripts. Renowned poets along with editors from established presses work with a select group of poets who have book-length (and chapbook-length) manuscripts with the goal of publication in mind. I held the first conference in Colrain, Massachusetts in 2006. Since then, I have developed a smaller “Intensive” Colrain Conference for returnees and/or those with manuscripts close to publication (finalist, semi-finalist, etc.) held in Greenfield, MA.

Why did you decide to concentrate on poetry manuscripts?

I learned from personal experience that virtually no guidance exists for poets who have gone through workshops, long periods of solitary writing, studied with mentors, and/or in MFA programs; for poets who have collected their individual, worked-on poems into manuscript form (or at least added up their poems into a manuscript’s worth of pages); for poets who have many unanswered questions, such as: Is this a “real” manuscript and if so, what are the publishing options? Is this manuscript in fact ready for submission to a publisher?  How do editors and publishers make decisions to publish a particular manuscript (or not)? What is the contemporary poetry publishing landscape like? How does one (or does one?) submit outside of the contest system? And especially: who is reading my manuscript and what are they thinking? The lack of substantive feedback on a manuscript from a “decider” is, I think, a lack that not only I felt when trying to publish my first book, but that every poet who reaches a certain stage in their development feels.

So, the venture began as both a personal and an intellectual challenge for me: how can a poet get feedback on one of the most important milestones of his/her poetic life from the person/s who matter most—the editors and publishers?

What features make this conference program unique?

The program design as a whole makes it unique. From the pre-conference work to the all -day manuscript analysis with well-known, well-published poets, to the editorial session with top-notch editors from presses such as Tupelo, Graywolf, Four Way, Barrow Street, Persea and others, to the final wrap-up with advice and strategies for moving ahead with the manuscript, the weekend is compressed, intense, and filled with useful information and honest feedback. This is not a retreat, not a workshop, not a craft lecture and not a “working vacation.”  It is a kind of total-immersion experience devoted to the gestalt of the manuscript, from creation, to selection and ordering, to the process of submission. Its purpose is to give the poet a way to see the manuscript that the poet has never had before.

What has been the success rate of attendees getting a manuscript published?

Over a period of 5 years and a total of approximately 350 attendees, there have been over 50 manuscripts taken for publication (1 out of 7). Some of these are chapbook publication (less than a quarter of the total). With only a few exceptions, the manuscripts have not been taken later by the editor who worked with that Colrain attendee. Of the few that have taken a manuscript from someone they worked with at Colrain, they were taken outside of the contest system, either through an open submission period at that press, or solicited some time after the conference. In other words, the point of the program—to educate attendees on the publication process in general, not to serve as talent-scouting operation—has played out just as I had hoped. The education received at Colrain is applicable to the manuscript submission process in general, not to particular presses and editors.

Can you put that success rate in terms of the general poetry population who submit a manuscript for publication?

I don’t know the numbers of poets who submit manuscripts for publication, nor how many times they submit.  All my knowledge of that is anecdotal. Based on what attendees report, and from what the editors say at the conference, every press is inundated with more submissions every year and most independent (i.e. non-trade) presses have instituted contests as a way to both raise money for the press and to control the submissions such that the 400 to over 1,000 that come in will come in at only a certain time of year. Some presses have shut down submissions entirely due to the backlog of those accepted and waiting. Suffice to say it is getting more and more difficult, especially for a first book publication (most, but not all, our attendees).

Have any attendees won awards?

Yes. So far, Colrain manuscripts have won the following awards:

• The Bakeless Prize
• Editor’s Choice Akron Poetry Prize from University of Akron Press
• Gerald Cable First Book Award
• T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize from Truman State University
• Orphic Prize from Dream Horse Press
• Levis Prize from Four Way Books
• Wick Prize from Kent State Press
• Kenneth and Geraldine Gell Poetry Prize
• Four Way Book Intro prize
• Beatrice Hawley Prize from Alice James Books
• Patricia Bibby First Book Award
• Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation
• Marsh Hawk Press Prize
• Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize from Persea Books
• Grayson Press Chapbook Prize
• Nightboat Books Poetry Prize

The complete list of published manuscripts is here:

http://www.colrainpoetry.com/omnis-news.htm

Tell us a little about your faculty members.

When I started the conference, I hired what fortuitously turned out to be my “core” faculty: the editors and poets who picked up on what I was doing immediately, met the challenge with excitement, and became experts in this new manuscript evaluation methodology. They return many times during the year. Fred Marchant, someone I greatly admire as a teacher and poet, and well-known in the Boston area, was my first co-teacher.

Besides the hope of getting a book published, what other advantages does Colrain offer?

The biggest advantage Colrain offers is that of receiving realistic feedback from press editors. Poets do not have the advantage of knowing what an editor thinks of their manuscript because they receive minimal to no feedback on their submission (s). If they do receive feedback, it isn’t the kind that helps them know what to do. Other advantages include the opportunity to work with top-notch poets and teachers, and to make contacts with advanced poets at a similar stage in their career.  The “hope of getting a book published” is translated at Colrain into solid knowledge poets can’t obtain elsewhere in the poetry world or in academia. Such knowledge is, to use a cliché, empowering.

How has Colrain changed and developed over the years?

I began Colrain with the idea that it would take place a few times a year and enroll up to 30 or so participants each time. After organizing two large events like this, I realized I needed to bring it down to a more manageable size and to instead hold it more often. It became a 12-14 people conference (divided into two groups) held about once a month (it is not held in December). I email a feedback form to participants after each conference asking for suggested changes along with comments. I’ve tinkered with the pre-conference work until finding the right combination, invited a variety of editors and teachers, and I have added new venues so that people have a choice of location and types of accommodation. I haven’t changed the original design of the program—it just works.

Since this conference assumes the poet has a manuscript, what are the other requirements for application?

Applicants who have accumulated a lot of poems that reach a certain page count but obviously need work are turned away. I look closely at the work samples applicants submit. There is a level of skill implicit in having a manuscript, but sometimes I get applications from poets who have obviously been writing without benefit of workshops or critical feedback and have lots of work to do on individual poems. I don’t accept these applicants. This program is not designed to workshop individual poems. Not only that, Colrain is not the place to come for your first experience in getting critical feedback! In fact, one change I made early on was not to accept anyone who hadn’t been through some kind of workshop/critical feedback experience—the two times I did (thinking poets who wrote on their own and just wanted knowledge of the book publication arena should be able to come if their work qualified them) were disastrous. For them. I had forgotten how strange and disturbing it can be to have your work held up in a critical light for the first time and these people were defensive, unable to take in the information, and generally unhappy. They had not yet developed any critical distance from their poems. It just didn’t work. So, experience in a workshop-type environment, or with a rigorous mentor, or with an MFA program, counts.  They need to be able to hear what’s being said.

What do you expect poets to enjoy most about the conference?

Our meals are lively, filled with excited talk, and we all eat together, three meals a day, faculty and students, at the same time, same place, every day. The food is fantastic. At the Round House, the owner, Rebecca Tippens, is a wonderful cook and community-conscious person. The surroundings at all locations create a sense of unity and these poets working at a high level share a sense of purpose. Our Sunday evening readings come at the end of two days of intense work and we have great fun that night. But after every conference, the observation made most often is about the thrill of receiving useful knowledge, how that translates into a clearer sense of direction, and, especially, a renewed confidence in working on and submitting the manuscript.

Here are some direct comments from participants:

http://www.colrainpoetry.com/omnis-comments.htm

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 15^th. 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:

 http://www.frostplace.org

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.

This is the first of a series of articles on New England presses. Our goal is to help serious writers determine the best match for their work by looking at the editorial and publishing criteria of each press.

Looking for older poets

Off the Grid Press has been around for six years and has published five books, two of which have won exemplary awards. Over those years Tam Lin Neville and Bert Stern, co-founders of the press, have grown the undertaking from a co-op model to a non-profit, but they have kept their original goal – to publish older, previously published poets who are sometimes overlooked by the current marketplace. Now they finance publications through contests and grants. See the rules for their upcoming contest.

Off the Grid’s first book

Off the Grid Press began by publishing a volume by Henry Braun. Braun participated in the famous Robert Lowell workshops at Boston University and went on to organize poetry read-ins against the Vietnam War. His early work, a volume titled The Virgil Woods, was published by Athenaeum Press in 1968. Individual poems were published in Poetry, The Nation, The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Colorado Review, and in several anthologies. But the second volume was difficult to place. That’s where Neville and Stern came in. Published by Off the Grid, the book, Loyalty, New and Selected Poems, went on to be the 2008 Maine Literary Awards Winner for Poetry.

Lee Sharkey, the second of the five poets published by Off the Grid, won the Individual Artists Fellowship in Literary Arts awarded by the 2010 Maine Arts Commission.

Off the Grid mission

Neville and Stern feel strongly about their mission. Neville says, “Older poets are not getting the same attention as younger poets. For older poets, there’s less time and, therefore, a sense of urgency.”

When asked what they look for in poetry, both chime in. “We like poetry that has music and rhythm. And we like poems that arrive at discovery rather than those start with it.” Stern adds, “We look for poets with a unique voice, one that selects the right word, the right line break.” Three of the books they have published deal specifically with issues of war, but they aren’t specially looking for political poetry.

Stern and Neville have a shared sense of what they like. They have worked as book doctors for poets in the past and have a long history of working as a team. They wanted to start the press simply for “the fun of it,” says Stern. “It’s exciting seeing a book from first draft to the finished product.”

Over the years they have had help from people like Carl Richardson, who helped them with all the paper work involved in setting up the organization for a non-profit status. Michael Albert, who is the University of Maine Press book designer, has helped with design, as has Joan Braun, the wife of Henry Braun,  Neville and Stern’s daughter, Anna Stern, has established their web design.

Contest