Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

Just spent a delightful couple of weeks attending readings and lectures at Warren Wilson College, where their non-residency MFA program convenes twice yearly--and
lucky for me, has open-to-the-public lectures and readings.

It was with great delight that I heard Stephen Dobyns' lecture on "The Origin of
Metaphor," as well as hearing him read three poems at a reading with Adria Bernardi,
Brooks Haxton and Grace Dane Mazur (Bernardi and Mazur being prose writers).

I heard David Baker's lecture on "Daring, Drama and Melodrama" (in Poetry) and
came away with a much keener sense of what a poem wants. (Not daring or melodrama!)

The entertaining James Longenbach gave a great lecture on the definitions of
Poem, Prose, Prose-Poem. Here are the answers:

A poem is the sound of language organized in lines.
Prose is the sound of language organized in sentences.
And a prose-poem...well, you'd have to attend the lecture to find that one!

C.J. Hribal gave a convincing lecture on "Comic and Cosmic Distance" --which was
an interesting examination of the writer distancing himself from the material at
hand. Omniscient tense, etc.

And lastly the magnificent Heather McHugh's lecture on Ars Poetica with wonderful
references (mostly to the work of Wallace Stevens) and all of her own bon mots (the woman is a genius) thrown in.

I'm exhausted from driving back and forth to these gifts of literary pleasure, but
I am glad I was able to attend as many as I did this year. And I regret missing
the ones scheduled just too close together to make my life comfortable.

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