2010 Featherstone & Martha's Vineyard Writers Residency Poetry
Readings
Featherstone, in coordination with the Martha's Vineyard Writers
Residency, offers a poetry series for the summer months at Featherstone. The series will feature island and
visiting poets to read the third Thursday of each month.
The August Series, also in coordination with the Martha's
Vineyard Writers Residency, will include acclaimed poets Billy Collins and Naomi Nye.
Featherstone/Writers Residency Thursday
Readings:
June 17: Clark Myers, Jennifer Tseng, Patrick Phillips — 6:30pm
July 15: Alice Kociemba and Nikkoletta Nousiopoulos — 6:30pm
August 19: Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Michelson — 6:30pm
2009 Featherstone/Writers Residency Thursday Readings:
June 18: Justen Ahren & John Maloney — 6:30pmJohn Maloney was born in Hartford, CT, attended high school in New York state and college in Washington, D.C. He lives in Chilmark and has been a stonemason on Martha’s Vineyard for thirty years. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, The New York Times Op-Ed page, Rolling Stone, Boston Book Review, and Agni (online). A poem is forthcoming in Fulcrum 7.
His two books are Proposal (Zoland Books, Cambridge, MA) and Town of Chilmark (Indian Hill Press, West Tisbury, MA).
American Life in Poetry, on online website funded by The University of Nebraska and The Poetry Foundation published After Work in Column 184.
Zoland Poetry Annual 1 published three poems.
He has two poems in The Book of Irish American Poetry: Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press)
He has one poem Good! published in We Came to Play, Writings on Basketball (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley CA). July 16: Fan Ogilvie & Fanny Howe — 6:30pmFan Ogilvie is a poet, teacher of poetry, and organizer of poetry workshops and events in Washington, DC, New Haven, CT, New York City and Martha’s Vineyard. In 1984 she received a Chester Jones Foundation commendation award. She is included in two chapbooks, “The Other Side of the Hill” and “In a Certain Place.” Her poems are published in The Poet and the Poem Anthology, Poet Lore, Three Sisters, Z’Arts, Fulcrum, An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, The Martha’s Vineyard Journal of Writing, online on Fieralingue, the Poet’s Corner, and others.
Ogilvie published a book YOU and KNOT: A Life in the Fall of 2008 with Xlribris (a division of Random House).
Her public readings include the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Corcoran Museum of Art, Georgetown University, the Stirling Library, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others.
Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. Her recent collections of poetry include On the Ground (Graywolf, 2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), and The End (1992).
Howe is also the author of several novels and prose collections, most recently, The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (Nightboat Books, 2005) and Nod (Sun & Moon Press, 1998). She has written short stories, books for young adults, and the collection of literary essays The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (University of California Press, 2003).
Howe was the recipient of the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems. She has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. August 20: Donald Nitchie & Honor Moore — 6:30pmHonor Moore is the author of The Bishop’s Daughter (2008), a memoir, that was simultaneously released in paperback (May 2009) with a reissue of her 1996 biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter. The Bishop's Daughter was named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times and chosen by the National Book Critics Circle as part of their "Good Reads" recommended reading list. It was also selected as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In April 2009, Library of America published Poems from the Women's Movement, an anthology edited by Honor Moore.
She is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir, and her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women’s Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited.
August Readings by Billy Collins and Naomi Nye:
Billy Collins
Sunday, August 2nd at 7:00 p.m.
(This Event is Open Seating, Tickets Will be Available at the Door)
Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. His readings are usually standing room only, and his audience – enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio – includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.
Naomi Nye
Saturday, August 29th at 7:00 p.m.
Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent 33 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 20 volumes. Her books of poetry include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, A Maze Me: Poems for Girls , Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, and You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006).
John Maloney: "Running By Water"
John Maloney was born in Hartford, CT, attended high school in New York state and college in Washington, D.C. He lives in Chilmark and has been a stonemason on Martha’s Vineyard for thirty years. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, The New York Times Op-Ed page, Rolling Stone, Boston Book Review, and Agni (online). A poem is forthcoming in Fulcrum 7.
John Maloney's two books are Proposal (Zoland Books, Cambridge, MA) and Town of Chilmark (Indian Hill Press, West Tisbury, MA).
American Life in Poetry, on online website funded by The University of Nebraska and The Poetry Foundation published After Work in Column 184.
Zoland Poetry Annual 1 published three poems.
He has two poems in The Book of Irish American Poetry: Eighteenth Century to the Present (Notre Dame Press)
He has one poem Good! published in We Came to Play, Writings on Basketball (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley CA).
Billy Collins: "The Lanyard"
(This version of "The Lanyard" varies from video version.)
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
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