The San Miguel Poetry Week

POETRY WORKSHOP with JENNIFER CLEMENT (www.jenniferclement.org)
six week session
meeting once a week 6 to 8 EST Monday nights

Starting July 8th

$425 USD
Contact: [email protected]


“It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes”. Gustave Flaubert



The workshop will be based on Gustave Flaubert’s sense of possibility as a writer to imagine anything and also recognize that it is often in the confluence of contradiction, found in metaphor and simile, where the most profound human experiences can be found.



Participants will do in-class exercises, read each other's work and respond, as well as discussing assigned in-class reading. The in-class reading and discussion will be centered on plays, poems, novels and short stories. We will devote time to essential writing skills but also delve into more mysterious areas of writing, which include the exploration of metaphor and simile, the senses and synesthesia, dialogue and etymology and music.



To add to the ideas of contradiction and imagination, we will discuss literature as a “fragmentary-whole” through both experimental language and different voices. T.S. Eliot describes this in his essay on the Metaphysical Poets, “The ordinary man’s experience is always chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking…”

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A poem for the New Year from Alastair Reid (1926-2014), with warm wishes to our poetry family and friends for a happy and healthy 2022. A poem about wishing, in fact.
HT Katherine Eggert

WISHES

Sudden silence, an angel passing over,
two saying the same word, simultaneously,
a star falling, the first fruit of the year,
the breastbone of the chicken, scraped and dry—
each an occasion to wish on, a wish given.

Easy enough for children, for whom to wish
is only a way of bringing a party closer
or acquiring pennies or cake, and for whose sake
we attend to teeth beneath stones and believe in magic,
not indulgently but somehow because
each time the silver coin appears where the tooth was
the party seems quick in coming, and beggars ride
pell-mell over the countryside.

But for ourselves, with fewer teeth and no faith
in miracles or good angels, a falling star
is likely to be uncomfortable. Oh, we can ask for
new lives, more money, or a change of face,
but hardly seriously. The heart is lacking.
We know too much, and wishing smacks of daydream
and discontent—not magic. Anyway, we are wary
of strings and snags or, worse, that once fulfilled,
the thing we wished for might be old and cold.

Yet still the children come, with serious
rapt faces, offering us wishes.

Take this wishbone, delicate where the breast was,
whitened now by the sun, stick-brittle.
Hold one stem of it, lightly, with your little
finger. I will hold the other.
Now make your wish, my love, but never tell.

And I? I always wish you well;
but here, in this poise before the fruit can fall,
or the star burn out, or the word dwindle,
before the hovering angel
flies out of mind, before the bone is broken,
I wish we wish the same wish, the unspoken.

THE SAN MIGUEL POETRY WEEK
Established in 1997
Poetry classes, workshops and readings
Friday, January 3 ~ Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Additional Guest Reader - Pedro Serrano

The San Miguel Poetry Week is an intimate program that provides a beautiful environment for work and vacation. San Miguel de Allende is known worldwide as one of Mexico's most charming towns. It is famous for its mild climate, 17th century architecture, excellent restaurants, music festivals, jazz bars, thermal baths, colorful markets and shops. This magical town has been a mecca for artists from all over the world. Great poets such as Pablo Neruda and Neal Cassidy lived here. Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siquieros painted here. Today writers and artists flock to San Miguel seeking beauty along with a rich cultural scene.

THE PROGRAM

The San Miguel Poetry Week is designed so that participants take classes, go to readings, work on new poems and enjoy time to explore San Miguel de Allende. In January 2020 the week begins Friday night, January 3rd, with a welcome cocktail at 7pm at the Hotel Posada de Las Monjas. The first day begins with a writing exercise class dedicated to creating new work. Mornings consist of small workshops. In the evenings, poetry readings by the faculty will be held at Colonial Teatro Santa Ana. On Wednesday, January 87th, the last night of the program, there will be a group poetry reading by all the participants and faculty. Additional optional Creative Writing Workshops conducted by the faculty are available These sessions are available to participants at an additional cost of $60.00 per workshop.

FACULTY JANUARY 2020

TONY BARNSTONE is Professor of English and Environment Studies at Whittier College. In addition to Pulp Sonnets, his books of poetry include Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry; The Golem of Los Angeles which won the Poets Prize and the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone, and a chapbook of poems titled Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His bilingual Spanish/English selected poems, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012) appeared in 2014. He has also co-edited the anthologies Dead and Undead Poems and Monster Verse. Among his awards are the Poets Prize, Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Arts Council, the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry and the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry.

JENNIFER CLEMENT is author of the memoir Widow Basquiat on the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the novels: A True Story Based on Lies and The Poison That Fascinates. Her novel Prayers for the Stolen received an NEA Fellowship for Literature, the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award, was a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner Award and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. In 2016 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for her new novel, Gun Love. She is also the author of several books of poetry including The Next Stranger (with an introduction by W.S. Merwin). Clement’s work has been translated into 30 languages. Her most recent work includes The Soft Land, Clement’s translation of Lopez Velarde’s poem La suave patria, with an essay by Luis Miguel Aguilar and paintings by Gustavo Monroy. Her novel Gun Love was an New York Times Editor’s Choice. In response to the novel, the New Yorker magazine wrote that Gun Love, ‘Offer[s] a glimpse of what a poetics of gun violence might look like.’ Clement is the current and first woman President of PEN International. In 1997 she co-founded the San Miguel Poetry Week with her sister, Barbara Sibley.

JAMES FENTON was born in Lincoln in 1949. He was educated at the Durham Choristers' School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He has worked as a political and literary journalist on the New Statesman; was a freelance reporter in Indo-China; spent a year in Germany working for the Guardian; was theatre critic for the Sunday Times for five years; chief book reviewer for The Times from 1984 to 1986; South East Asian correspondent for the Independent from 1986 to 1988 and a columnist for them until 1995. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. James Fenton was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1994 to 1999. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2007. In 2015 he won the PEN Pinter prize. He is currently writing a collection of unusual biographies called PRIVATE LIVES, and a book about pirates for Notting Hill Press. His Collected Poems, Yellow Tulips, were published by Faber & Faber in June 2012.Yellow Tulips is a gathering from four decades of work by a writer described by the Observer as 'the most talented poet of his generation'.

CAROL FROST was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from the State University of Oneonta and Syracuse University. The author of numerous collections of poetry, including Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (2014), Honeycomb: Poems (2010), The Queen’s Desertion (2006), I Will Say Beauty (2003), Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems (2000), and the chapbook The Salt Lesson (1976), she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and won several Pushcart Prizes. Frost has taught at Hartwick College, Washington University, and Wichita State University; she has had several teaching residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, and was a visiting poet at University of Wollongong, Australia. She founded and for 15 years directed the Catskill Poetry Workshop at Hartwick College. She holds the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Chair of English at Rollins College, where she directs the Winter with the Writers program. In October, 2019, MadHat Press will publish Carol Frost’s new poetry collection Alias City - with poems that originally appeared in such places as The New Republic, Poetry, Poetry International, Kenyon Review, Subtropics, Harvard Review, Shenandoah, and Plume. The poems feature cities and in alternating sections an immigrant interlocutor who tells a bit about where she came from and some of the ways selfhood is found and lost.

LUIS ALBERTO URREA, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of 18 books. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, “I am more interested in bridges, not borders.” The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His latest novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named to many best of the year lists. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award in 2016 for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. The Hummingbird’s Daughter, an historical novel based on the life of Teresita Urrea, known as the Mexican Joan of Arc, won the Kiriyama Prize for fiction. Urrea has also won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009, “Amapola”). His first book, Across the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the Christopher Award. He also won a 1999 American Book Award for his memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life and his book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He won a Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in the 1996 Best American Poetry collection. Urrea is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois.

San Miguel de Allende at night

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/151534/apprenticed-to-a-master

Apprenticed To a Master by John McIntyre On Marianne Moore and Grace Schulman.

https://merwinconservancy.org/2019/03/pulitzer-prize-winning-poet-w-s-merwin-passes-away-at-91/?fbclid=IwAR3N5VMHMks6dGA75PoGJ9FV6bQCpjjx408rE57fPVgEw7OolfC_mdnXzgM

PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING POET W.S. MERWIN PASSES AWAY AT 91 Haʻiku, HI — W.S. Merwin, former United States poet laureate, Academy of American Poets Chancellor, environmental activist, literary translator and two-time Pulitzer prize-winning author, passed aw…

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