L I T T O R A L

The 5 pm update on Tropical Depression Three shows the forecast models in agreement. Among the little joys of life in the subtropics are the less-than-serious storm events the hurricane season can bring. Above, you see Tropical Depression Three, which may mature into Tropical Storm Bonnie as it enters the Florida Straits tomorrow. This means wind– maybe as much as 50 knots, but likely closer to 30– and at least a couple of inches of rain as the storm approaches, passes over, and leaves the Florida Keys tomorrow afternoon and night.

Here on the vulnerable and enduring Littoral, we keep Elizabeth Bishop's early Key West poems with our survival gear. She knew how to ride out a storm:

     It is marvellous to wake up together
     At the same minute; marvellous to hear
     The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
     To feel the air suddenly clear
     As if electricity had passed through it
     From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
     All over the roof the rain hisses,
     And below, the light falling of kisses.

     An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
     It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
     If lightning struck the house now, it would run
     From the four blue china balls on top
     Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
     And we imagine dreamily
     How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
     Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

     And from the same simplified point of view
     Of night and lying flat on one's back
     All things might change equally easily,
     Since always to warn us there must be these black
     Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
     The world might change to something quite different,
     As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
     Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

Untitled Elizabeth Bishop poem from Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2006.

UPDATE: 7/23/2010 4:00 p.m.: What did become Tropical Storm Bonnie turned out to be even less than less-than-serious. As the poorly-organized and fast-moving system scurried across the Florida mainland, Key West saw an ordinary summer day: 80-something, breezy, sun, and clouds.

Photo by Soo-Jeong Kang When Frank Bruni was named restaurant critic for The New York Times in 2004, he was unknown to the food world. As a journalist at the Detroit Free Press and the Times, he was praised for his investigative reporting of the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and his coverage of Governor George W. Bush's presidential campaign. But his surprise appointment to this apparently enviable job– paid to eat in a city known for excellent restaurants– was to be, for deeply personal reasons, the greatest challenge of Bruni's life.

In Born Round (2009), Bruni's third book, he details the life that lent such irony to his tenure as the country's most notorious arbiter of culinary taste. As a child, judging from the book's many pictures, he was just slightly chubby. But in an Italian-American family obsessed with food as a symbol of status and celebration, he was clearly the most obsessed, devouring plate after plate of all that was available. With age came an additional obsession: his body and its perceived attractiveness to other men. Bruni attempts just about every fad diet that comes along and, in college, experiments with bulimia, a dangerous trick that allows him to have his cake and not eat it too. All the while, as the pictures tell, he's still not that fat. But by the end of the calorie-fueled Bush campaign, Bruni is in his late 30s and, indeed, significantly overweight. Decades of withering self-criticism have finally found an ample target.

Bruni begins to get a handle on his weight just before the Times makes its tantalizing and terrifying job offer. As restaurant critic, he will be required to eat everything on the menu at all of the city's best restaurants, occasionally eating dinner twice in one night, and always returning to a given restaurant multiple times before writing the reviews that will earn him admiration, envy, and scorn. In restaurant- and media-mad New York, getting through these meals undetected requires constant subterfuge; high jinks ensue as maîtres d question Bruni's false identities and chuckle at his sometimes clumsy disguises. By the time this entertaining masquerade is through, we've begun to see what we hope is the real Frank Bruni: a man at peace with his urges, appetites, and even occasional binges, a battle-tested and levelheaded adult, practiced in the fine art of self-forgiveness.

Frank will join us in Key West this January for The Hungry Muse, and we had a chance last week to ask him a few questions. Here's how it went:


Littoral: What have you been up to since Born Round?

Frank Bruni: I write full-time for The New York Times Magazine, and remain a Times staffer, which I've been for some 15 years now. Yikes, I'm old! From that position I get to wander through the paper a lot: I recently did a huge Dining section piece on the restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, and I write a column on drinking and bars called the Tipsy Diaries for the Weekend section on every other Friday. For the magazine I specialize in profiles: over the last six months I've written about the Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, the television doctor Mehmet Oz, and Carly Fiorina, the business pioneer running for Senate in California.

L: Were you surprised by the notoriety you found during your tenure as restaurant critic for The New York Times? Had your predecessors– Ruth Reichl, Bryan Miller, William Grimes– found the same level of celebrity? How would you say your time at the Times was different from theirs?

FB: I wasn't surprised by the notoriety, precisely because that sort of notoriety, or at least a high public profile, seemed to go with the job. It was clear to me from what Bryan and Ruth and Biff (that's what Grimes goes by) had gone through that The New York Times restaurant critic was a lightning rod for criticism, a magnet for chatter, a source of public fascination. I braced myself for that.

What was significantly different about my tenure was that it was the first to come along when the blogosphere was truly full-blown: when web sites analyzed the critic's every word publicly and in real time. Eater.com, for example, did a "BruniBetting" feature– they now have something similar with Sam Sifton– that guessed how I'd rate a restaurant by deconstructing my sensibilities and approach through time. That sort of thing ratcheted everything up a bit.

L: Do you think this rapid-response media environment has a discernible effect on food and the culture around it? Is the way we're eating now affected by the way we create and consume information online?

FB: All the instant blog attention to new places can sometimes mean several things. Restaurants pay more attention to the way they come out of the gate than the way they'll mature and stabilize and endure through time. Restaurants that come out of the gate wobbly may never get a chance to recover: the naysaying and catcalling on a myriad of web sites threaten to do them in. And restaurants with a ready-made curiosity factor– because they're participating in a growing trend, because they have a chef who just got TV time on a reality show, or because they have a flashy gimmick– sometimes get more attention than they deserve, because they're able to hog the blogosphere, which needs quick and easy and instant items. Blogs aren't different from traditional media that way, but they're like traditional media on steroids, traditional media on a sugar high. The buzz is louder and more pervasive than in the past, and I think it leads people in the buzziest directions. Dining out has become more faddish as a result.

L: As the Times' "Tipsy Diarist," you've turned your focus to cocktails– a job that would seem to have sometimes painful consequences. Did you have any concerns about taking on this assignment? What's your hangover remedy?

Turtle excluder used in the Gulf shrimp fishery. NOAA Fisheries Collection. Today's fresh catch from around the web:

•  Ruth Reichl's salt-crusted chickens and roast pig - "the most magical night of my life."

•  Frank Bruni's guide to midrange eating in out-of-the-way Rome. Plus, drinking while taking a little off the top.

•  Jonathan Gold, tastemaker: "If the dilution is correct and it has the proper chill, it almost doesn't matter what's in it."

•  John T. Edge eats canvasback ducks with Mark Twain and tracks Lowcountry cuisine's working-class roots in North Charleston.

•  Sugar Cane and Shortstops - the Times on Mark Kurlansky's new book about that other American pastime.

•  Martha Stewart, meet David Mas Masumoto. Mr. Mas Masumoto, meet Martha.

Join all of the above (sans Ms. Stewart) in Key West this January for The Hungry Muse: An Exploration of Food in Literature.

By STUART KRIMKO


James Tate in Key West. Photos by Curt Richter. David Lehman, praising Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in Newsweek on the occasion of the publication of her Collected Poems, wrote that she "accomplished a magical illumination of the ordinary, forcing us to examine our surroundings with the freshness of a friendly alien."

I was reminded of this apt summary towards the end of James Tate's reading at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, when a friendly alien in fact appeared in a poem:

Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was
in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who
it was. It was Roger Lawson. Roger was a practical joker of the worst sort...

So begins "The Cowboy," from Tate's most recent volume The Ghost Soldiers. The narrator goes on disbelieving in the alien for about half the poem, until he reports.

...I nearly dropped the groceries. There was a nearly transparent 

fellow with large pink eyes standing about three feet tall.

Tate's humor in this poem, and in the other three he read from The Ghost Soldiers at the 2010 Seminar's Friday morning session, is the primary thing I suspect most Seminar attendees came away with. I say so because almost every sentence Tate read was greeted with a huge roar of laughter, as if the poems in their public manifestation were a series of one-liners. Tate did not seem to shy away from this. He even stifled a few chuckles himself as he made his way through his carefully inflected delivery. 

The laughter seemed an appropriate response as Tate developed the absurd situations, the menacing Middle American surrealism, of each poem. But as the poems went on they revealed their emotional cores, which seemed to me to be anything but funny. In "The Cowboy," for instance, just when the narrator has agreed to collaborate with the alien and help fulfill his wish "to meet a real cowboy," he finds the creature "dancing on the kitchen table, a sort of ballet / but very sad." The alien has heard from his father: "'I just / received word. I'm going to die tonight. It's really a joyous / occasion, and I hope you'll help me celebrate by watching The Magnificent Seven...'" The situation only becomes more poignant, and by the end of the poem it borders on heartbreaking:

...I felt an unbearable sadness come over me. "Why must
you die?" I said. "Father decides these things. It is probably
my reward for coming here safely and meeting you," he said. "But
I was going to take you to meet a real cowboy," I said. "Let's
pretend you are my cowboy," he said.


Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven Granted, the premise is a comic one, and one can argue that the emotional punch of the finale is only increased by the yuks generated by the lines that lead up to it. But I found myself feeling a little like a friendly alien myself as the laughs cascaded throughout the San Carlos Institute's auditorium, a friendly curmudgeon of an alien who would have trouble explaining why the people in the theater were laughing so loudly and for so long at the sad words of the man on stage.

The table is set for our twin bill 2011 Key West Literary Seminar: THE HUNGRY MUSE: An Exploration of Food in Literature. Panelists have been apportioned to one of two (or in some cases, both) sessions. Here's how the menu is shaping up:

Session One: January 6 - 9, 2011
Diana Abu-Jaber, Roy Blount Jr., Frank Bruni, Billy Collins, Jason Epstein, Jonathan Gold, Darra Goldstein, Daniel Halpern, Madhur Jaffrey, Judith Jones, Harry Mathews, Bich Minh Nguyen, Molly O'Neill, Julia Reed, Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, and Kevin Young

Session Two: January 13 - 16, 2011
Elizabeth Berg, Roy Blount Jr., Kate Christensen, Billy Collins, John T. Edge, Adam Gopnik, Gael Greene, Jane Hirshfield, Madhur Jaffrey, Mark Kurlansky, David Mas Masumoto, Nicole Mones, Bich Minh Nguyen, Molly O'Neill, Michael Ruhlman, and Calvin Trillin

We may add a few more panelists over the summer. Speakers and session assignments will be announced as they're added to the roster-- right here on Littoral, and also on our Speakers page, where you can see all of our current speakers, with links to their biographies, bibliographies, and other information from around the Web.

You are welcome to attend either or both sessions of the Seminar, which run from Thursday to Monday. If you are interested in registering for the Seminar, we urge you to act soon, as seats do fill quickly. We will hold your space for a deposit of $100. Click here to register.

Photo by Steven Kovich

Billy Collins is a two-term United States Poet Laureate and the founder of Poetry 180, a teaching aid for high school students founded on the belief that "poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race." Once called "the most popular poet in America" by The New York Times, Collins has, over the course of eight collections of poetry, proven his remarkable facility for attracting a broad audience of readers. Most recently, Collins is the editor of Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, with paintings by renowned bird illustrator David Allen Sibley.

This recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar features Collins delivering a lecture and reading entitled "Dear Reader." "I think of the poem as a social encounter," says Collins, one equally dependent upon both reader and writer, for "the poem is completed in the mind of the reader." He quotes noted baseball writer Roger Angell saying "That's what writing is all about: the love of strangers"; and he discusses the work and thought of writers including William Butler Yeats, Jorge Luis Borges, Walt Whitman, and Mark Strand. Collins illustrates the points of his discussion with several poems that explore the intimacy shared by reader and writer. These are "A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal," "You, Reader," "Directions," "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July," "The Trouble with Poetry," "Purity," and "Envoy."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(25:44) / 14.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Billy Collins. Used with generous permission from Billy Collins.

As promised, and right on schedule: the Royal Poincianas all over the island are now in full bloom.

The Royal Poinciana trees have just begun to set out their flowers. By the end of the month, the entire canopies will be full of the bright red or orange blossoms. Elizabeth Bishop was 26 years old when she first visited Key West in 1938. Her letters from that year, especially those to her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, are filled with descriptions of the subtropical island's flora and fauna.

Here's an excerpt from one of them:

May 5, 1938

It is spring here now and the Royal Poinciana trees are in bloom all along the streets– brilliant flame color or dark red. Also a large tree– Spanish lime?– that sheds in some places fine green powder all over the streets, very pretty. Jasmine makes the whole town smell sweet at night– and all the cats have kittens. There has been the ugliest mother cat I have ever seen, and two kittens, in the yard of the little house we're buying, for five days. I don't want them– they are crosseyed, mangy, and mixtures of white, black, orange, gray, and tiger– but they are growing so thin I couldn't stand it, so I took over a bottle of milk, and now they obviously consider themselves mine. The mother looks just like Picasso's Absinthe Drinker.

Though 72 years have altered Bishop's Key West immeasurably, she'd still recognize the house she bought that year at 624 White Street, which remains miraculously untouched. And she'd know the fine green Spanish lime pollen dusting the cars and sidewalks outside our office, the red Poinciana blossoms which have just begun to open, and the jasmine and jasmine-like perfume of the 21st-century night.

By MICHAEL SNYDER


James Leo Herlihy in his backyard with friends, Key West, 1960s.
All photos by Bud Lee. © Bud Lee / The Serge Group James Leo Herlihy was born in Detroit in 1927 and raised there and in Chillicothe, Ohio. He lived in New York City, Los Angeles, and, off and on from 1957 to 1973, in Key West, where he became "captivated," finding it "a wonderful place to work and write."

"The town excited me too much," Herlihy told Key West Literary Seminar co-founder Lynn Kaufelt. "I spent all my time exploring, walking the streets. The place was mysterious, funky, indescribably exotic. It had much of the charm of a foreign country, but you had the post office and the A&P and the phone worked, so life was easy." Key West was still "a pretty well-kept secret," neither a tourist favorite nor a literary and cultural hotspot: "Nightlife was delightful, totally unsophisticated, nonliterary."

Herlihy's work brought him celebrity in his own time. Like his close friend and mentor Tennessee Williams, Herlihy was a gay author whose works delved into taboo subjects and broke new ground for what was acceptable to major publishers. His 1958 play Blue Denim confronted teenage sexuality and abortion and was praised in a newspaper column by Eleanor Roosevelt. His novels were acclaimed by writers like William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Nelson Algren, and Williams, who praised Herlihy's writing as "luminous," "true," and "perfect," hailing him as the most significant new writer since Carson McCullers. His novel Midnight Cowboy was made into a film starring Dustin Hoffman, and won an Academy Award for Best Picture despite being given an "X" rating.


Herlihy (seated) with Tennessee Williams, a friend and mentor, in front of the travelers' palms at Williams's Duncan Street home. Key West's influence on Herlihy is plain from the settings of his fiction. In All Fall Down (1960), the adolescent protagonist Clinton Williams follows his idolized but ne'er-do-well older brother Berry-Berry all the way down to "Key Bonita," a stand-in for Key West. His 1967 short story "A Story that Ends with a Scream" is set in Key West, as is "Ceremony for the Midget," in which the midget is an apparition or hallucination symbolizing the spirit of a beloved bar that is closing. "The Day of the Seventh Fire" captures the mood of Key West in the 1930s. And at the end of Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck and Ratso are riding a Greyhound to the sunny Florida of Ratso's dreams when tragedy strikes.

One of the most exciting things about Key West for Herlihy was the presence of Tennessee Williams. He told Kaufelt, "Before Tennessee had a pool installed, he and I went swimming off the Monroe County pier nearly every summer day at twilight . . . it was inexpressibly comforting to have the daily company of a kindred spirit; just knowing we were involved in the same sort of lunatic pursuit provided some essential ground that meant everything to me." Williams told Kaufelt of their regular ritual of meeting at County Beach, trading lines from their favorite Wallace Stevens poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," before diving in. As late as 1976, when Herlihy's mother died of cancer, Williams was there for him. Herlihy wrote Paul Bowles that year that he spent three months in Key West with his dying mother: "Tennessee was in Key West during much of that time, and he was enormously considerate. Sent flowers, messages. Cooked for me. Even showed up at the funeral mass, volunteering to act as pallbearer. I was impressed and moved by it all."


Herlihy beneath a young mango tree in his backyard. Along with Williams, Herlihy became part of a circle of friends and lovers in Key West– mostly gay writers and "theater people"– that included James "Jimmy" Kirkwood Jr., co-writer of A Chorus Line and author of cult novels and plays including There Must Be a Pony!; Evan Rhodes, the author of The Prince of Central Park; one-time singer and agent Dick Duane, to whom Herlihy dedicated two of his finest novels, All Fall Down and Midnight Cowboy; and to a lesser extent, visiting writers like Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Author Christopher Isherwood paints the scene in an entry from his diary in August 1959: "(Broadway producer Walter) Starcke came by, en route for Japan and round the world . . . 'Now I live by grace,' says Starcke. 'I live every hour of every day to its fullest.' Actually he is in Key West, dealing in real estate and having parties with Herlihy and his friend which sometimes go on until morning. Lots of sex."

Photo by Curt Richter Paul Muldoon was born and raised in Northern Ireland and has lived in the United States since 1987. He is poetry editor for The New Yorker and the author of more than 10 collections of poems, including the 2002 Moy Sand and Gravel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written rock lyrics for Warren Zevon and his own band, Rackett, in which he plays rhythm guitar.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Muldoon delivers a presentation entitled "The Borderline." In it, Muldoon talks about his childhood growing up in a Catholic ghetto in Northern Ireland, and discusses how the political and military struggles around the Irish border and beyond affected the lives of his family and friends. The selection of poems Muldoon reads speak to similar issues; they include "Anseo," "Cuba," "A Christmas in the 50s," "The Loaf," and "Side Man."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(21:47) / 13.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Paul Muldoon. Used with generous permission from Paul Muldoon.

Photo by Sharon McGauley As a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Rita Dove is among the most accomplished and recognizable poets of our time. Her collections of poetry include Thomas and Beulah, American Smooth, and, most recently, Sonata Mulattica, an ambitious and fascinating poetic recreation of the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a mixed-race violinist born in 1780 in Vienna.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Dove delivers a reading and talk entitled "How Does a Shadow Shine?" In it, she reads excerpts from Sonata Mulattica and discusses her motivation in applying poetic language and intensity to the strange life and times of the violinist Bridgetower, whose prodigious talents and exotic ethnicity were exploited by his showman father to considerable commercial and creative success. We learn of Bridgetower's relationship with the great composer Ludwig von Beethoven, whose Violin Sonata No. 9 was originally written for Bridgetower, and we hear poems including "Prologue of the Rambling Sort," "Disappearance," "The Wardrobe Lesson," "Black Billy Waters at his Pitch," "Ludwig von Beethoven's Return to Vienna," "Cambridge, Great Saint Mary's Church," and "The End, with MapQuest"

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(34:59) / 20.6 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Rita Dove. Used with generous permission from Rita Dove.

Photo by Robert Casper Matthea Harvey is the author of three collections of poetry and is a contributing editor to jubilat and BOMB. Her 2007 collection, Modern Life, was a New York Times Notable Book, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Weston Cutter, writing for Bookslut, has called Harvey's work "a form of courage, an act of daring at the outer limits of poetry."

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Harvey begins with an unpublished poem that has an image for its title. She continues with two more unpublished poems, "My Wolf-Sister" and "My Octopus Orphan," and a selection of works from Modern Life, including "Inside the Good Idea," "The Future of Terror" parts 1 and 11, "A Theory of Generations," and "Emphasis on Mister or Peanut, Robo or Boy." The final two poems are the uncollected "Baked Alaska, A Theory Of" and "Everything Must Go."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(16:05) / 9.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Matthea Harvey. Used with generous permission from Matthea Harvey.

Tina Chang Tina Chang is the author of Half-Lit Houses and the co-editor of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond. The New York native was appointed poet laureate of Brooklyn in 2010, and has previously earned honors including an award from the Academy of American Poets and a residency at the MacDowell Colony. Chang's new book, Of Gods & Strangers, is forthcoming in 2011 from Four Way Books.

In this recording from the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar, New Voices, Chang reads a selection of poems and discusses the inspiration and influences– from historical figures to newspaper articles to karaoke to conversation– that engendered them. Poems include "Wild Invention," "Love is Scripted," "Self-portrait as an Imaginary D.J.," "The Empress Dowager Has One Bird," "The Empress Dowager Contemplates Her Lineage," "Three Versions of Desiring," and "A Full Life."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices
(18:23) / 10.7 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008, 2010 Tina Chang. Used with generous permission from Tina Chang.

John Malcolm Brinnin and Rita Dove aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1995. Photo by Fred Viebahn.

John Malcolm Brinnin helped establish New York City's 92nd St. Y as a national focal point for poetry in the 1950s and was a crucial influence on the Key West Literary Seminar in our early years. The author of Grand Luxe: The Transatlantic Style, he was also a great fan of travel aboard luxury ocean liners, the now-extinct class of which the QE2 was the highest iteration. Rita Dove, at the time, was the nation's poet laureate.

The Key West Literary Seminar offers three annual awards to emerging writers of exceptional merit living in the United States. The Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award, the Marianne Russo Award, and the Scotti Merrill Memorial Award each provide full tuition to our January Seminar and Writers' Workshop Program, round-trip airfare, seven nights' lodging, support for living expenses while in Key West, and the opportunity to appear on stage during the Seminar.

Past KWLS award-winners include Patricia Engel (Marianne Russo Award, 2009), whose debut story collection, Vida, is coming from Grove/Atlantic this Fall; and Nami Mun (Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award, 2008), who went on the publish the critically acclaimed Miles From Nowhere.

In addition to these named awards, we provide limited financial assistance, primarily in the form of fee reductions, to teachers, librarians, writers, and students who would otherwise not be able to attend the Seminar or Writers' Workshop Program. We may also provide discounted lodging options to a small number of applicants.

The application window for the 2011 awards and financial assistance program is now open; complete information will be found here.

Photo by Sharon McGauley Robert Pinsky is an acclaimed poet, translator, and essayist whom The New York Times has called "our finest living specimen of this sadly rare breed." He has spoken of poetry as "one of the most fundamental pleasures a person can experience," and as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1997-2000, he established the hugely successful Favorite Poem Project, in which Americans from a wide range of backgrounds shared their favorite poems, asserting the role of poetry in the lives of Americans.

In this recording of the John Hersey Memorial Address from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Pinsky reads some of his own favorite poems while musing about the process of remembering and forgetting in the context of modernist poetry. Pinsky discusses work by well-known poets including John Keats, Walter Savage Landor, Dante, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Wilbur. He also discusses an anonymous poem from the 18th century that was left with an infant at England's Foundling Hospital; a visit he made to a Zulu Sangomo on a trip to Africa; and the work of psychoanalytic writer Hans Loewald. Pinsky's opening remarks on Cuban patriot José Martí refer to the history of the San Carlos Institute, the venue where the lecture was given, and where Martí campaigned for Cuba's independence from Spain.

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(49:48) / 30.4 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Robert Pinsky. Used with generous permission from Robert Pinsky.

Photo by Sharon McGauley Natasha Trethewey is the author of three collections of poetry, including Native Guard, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq's Ophelia, and Domestic Work, which won the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A native of Mississippi, a member of the Dark Room Collective, and the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University, Trethewey's work often shifts from the personal to the historical, confronting subjects that include the legacies of racism in America and her own experiences as a person of mixed race growing up in the deep South.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Trethewey reads a selection of poems including "Limen," "Genus Narcissus," "Myth," "Miscegenation," "Taxonomy," and "Knowledge: After a Chalk Drawing by J.H. Hasselhorst, 1864."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(17:57) / 10.3 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Natasha Trethewey. Used with generous permission from Natasha Trethewey.

Photo by Christina Koci Hernandez Kay Ryan is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Her work has drawn comparisons to Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop, and like these poets, Ryan's masterfully concise poems fuse acute observation of the physical world with equally sharp introspection; they are both funny and dark, playful and ready to strike. She has earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and is one of the fourteen Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, is being published by Grove Press this month.

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Ryan reads 23 poems, all but one of which are included in her forthcoming Selected Poems. Beginning with the unpublished "A Cat," Ryan goes on to read "Her Politeness," and several poems from the 1994 Copper Beech Press collection Flamingo Watching, including the title poem, "This Life," "Apology," "Vacation," "A Certain Kind of Eden," "No Rest for the Idle," "The Narrow Path," "Spring," "Impersonal," "The Working Kabbalist," "The Test We Set Ourself," "The Hinge of Spring," "Deer," "Poetry Is a Kind of Money," "Masterworks of Ming," and "The Great-Taloned Osprey Nests in Scotland." Ryan concludes the reading with the newer poems "Bait Goat," "Dogleg," "Easter Island," and "Spiderweb."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(29:52) / 21.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Kay Ryan. Used with generous permission from Kay Ryan.

Course offerings for our January 2011 Writers' Workshop Program have been announced. Faculty will include NPR's "voice of books," Alan Cheuse, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and PEN/Faulkner Foundation co-founder Susan Shreve. Each workshop has its own unique focus, ranging from poetry to memoir writing to fiction to oral storytelling. In line with the theme for our 29th annual Seminar, "The Hungry Muse," many of this year's workshops will also consider the role of food as creative inspiration.

Our Workshop Program is designed to provide writers at all stages of development with various opportunities to explore the craft of writing, and each class is limited to between 8 and 12 participants to ensure individual attention. Workshops are generally four days in length and cost $450. They usually take place in the morning, and include optional afternoon and evening activities, including manuscript consultations, informal talks, and open readings. An orientation dinner is provided on January 9.

The Workshop Program is distinct from the Seminar; you may attend either or both. This year's workshops take place January 9-13, in between the first and second sessions of the Seminar. Visit our Writers' Workshop Program page for complete information about each workshop.

Construction of new author pages is now complete for all 22 confirmed speakers for the upcoming 2011 Key West Literary Seminar: "The Hungry Muse: an exploration of food in literature." The pages include biographical information, selected bibliographies, and links to resources like interviews, book reviews, and audio and video clips from around the web.

The upcoming Seminar promises to be a unique exploration of food's place in our literary culture, chaired by a once-in-a-lifetime assembly of today's great writers, thinkers, chefs, and eaters. Confirmed speakers at the January 2011 Seminar already include leading food critics Frank Bruni, Ruth Reichl, and Jonathan Gold (the only food critic ever to have won a Pulitzer Prize); as well as publishing legends like Judith Jones (editor to both Julia Child and John Updike), Jason Epstein (co-founder of The New York Review of Books, editor to Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Waters), and Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern. The list also includes compelling novelists like PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Kate Christensen and Diana Abu-Jaber, perennial best-selling writer Mark Kurlansky (author of Salt, Cod, and The Big Oyster), and gourmand-funnymen Roy Blount Jr. and Calvin Trillin. And that's not all. Poets Billy Collins and Kevin Young will be here, as will one-of-a-kind writer Harry Mathews and Southern food expert John T. Edge.

Click here for the complete list of speakers. And stay tuned for more names (including one or two very special guests) to be announced in the coming weeks.

Registration for the Seminar is still $495 and advance registration is strongly encouraged. We fully expect both sessions (January 6-9 and 13-16) to sell out 2-3 months in advance.

We are delighted to announce a collaboration with The Poetry Foundation that presents recordings from the Key West Literary Seminar audio archives to a much larger audience. The Chicago-based foundation is one of the largest literary foundations in the world, the publisher of the historic Poetry magazine, and the creator of poetryfoundation.org- arguably the most comprehensive resource for readers of poetry on the web.

Among the Foundation's online initiatives are nine podcast series, including iTunes's top-ranked poetry podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, an offbeat exploration of contemporary American poetry hosted by Curtis Fox. A recent episode, "Worshipful Company of Snowbirds," features a recording of poet James Tate at the 2003 Seminar, with commentary by Fox and KWLS media director Arlo Haskell. Other Foundation podcasts include the monthly Poetry Lecture Series, which features talks given by notable scholars and critics on poets, poetry, and their intersections with other art forms. The current episode is Mark Doty's keynote address from the 2008 Seminar, "Tide of Voices." We're told these two KWLS recordings have already been listened to by more than 20,000 people on the Foundation's website.

We're grateful to Cathy Halley, Jim Sitar, and all the good people at The Poetry Foundation for making this possible. We hope it is the beginning of a long and happy collaboration that will help bring KWLS audio to even more educators, students, and readers worldwide.

Browse all podcasts from The Poetry Foundation

Subscribe to KWLS Audio Archives in iTunes

Photo by Rollie McKenna Joy Williams is the influential author of dozens of short stories and essays, which are collected in Taking Care (1982), Escapes (1990), Honored Guest (2004), and Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She has also written four novels, including The Quick and the Dead (2000), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and State of Grace (1973), nominated for a National Book Award.

In this recording from the 1989 Key West Literary Seminar, Williams reads "The Last Generation," which would be published in Esquire later that year. It tells the story of 9 year old Tommy, whose mother has recently been killed in a car crash, and his relationship with Audrey, the darkly philosophical ex-girlfriend of Tommy's teenaged older brother

"The last generation has got certain responsibilities," Audrey said, "though you might think we wouldn't. We should know nothing and want nothing and be nothing. But at the same time we should want everything and know everything and be everything."
Upstairs in his room, Walter Junior was lifiting weights. They could hear him, breathing, gasping. Audrey's strange, smooth face looked blank. It looked empty.
"Did you love my brother?" Tommy asked. "Do you still love him?"
"Certainly not," Audrey said. "We were just passing friends."

From KWLS 1989: The American Short Story: A Renaissance
(31:42) / 14.7 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 1989, 2010 Joy Williams. Used with generous permission from Joy Williams.

Photo by Curt Richter Richard Wilbur is among the singular poets of our time, the only living poet to have twice won the Pulitzer Prize, and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. As a young veteran of World War II, Wilbur became friends with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and began writing the refined and rigorously optimistic poetry that characterize his sixty-year oeuvre. In the 1960s, Wilbur and his wife Charlee began spending winters in Key West, where he became friends with a circle of poets including James Merrill, John Ciardi, and John Malcolm Brinnin. In January 2010 we welcomed Wilbur back to Key West with Clearing the Sill of the World, our 28th annual Seminar, held in his honor.

In this recording from January 9, 2010, Wilbur reads more than two dozen poems and translations, many of which will be published by Harcourt this fall in his 10th collection, Anterooms. These new poems include "The House," "A Measuring Worm," "Flying," "Trismegistus," "The Censor," "Out Here," and several new translations of riddles from Symphosias ("Nine lives I have...," "I have no tresses...," "Through middle air...," "All things I powerfully crush...," and "A god's sweet mistress..."). He reads "Security Lights, Key West" from the 2004 New Poems as well as "Nuns at Eve" by John Malcolm Brinnin, for whom the Seminar's Saturday evening address is named. From Mayflies (2000), Wilbur reads "For C.," "Crow's Nests," a translation of Valeri Petrov's "A Cry From Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being." From 1987's New & Collected Poems, we get "The Ride," Vinicius de Moraes's "Song," and "Hamlen Brook," while from 1976's The Mind-Reader we get "The Writer," and the comic poems "Piccola Commedia," "To His Skeleton," and "The Prisoner of Zenda." Wilbur continues this survey with "Complaint," from Waking to Sleep (1969), and "Advice to a Prophet," from the eponymous 1961 collection, before concluding with several pieces from one of Wilbur's books of light-hearted verse for children, The Disappearing Alphabet.

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(1:06:52) / 31 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.

More Richard Wilbur resources from KWLS:

A reading in tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, from KWLS 1993

A reading from KWLS 2003

The World is Fundamentally a Great Wonder: Wilbur in conversation with Arlo Haskell, 2009

Photo by Curt Richter Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City and graduated from Princeton University in 1973. She studied Zen for nearly eight years at the San Francisco Zen Center, and has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Bennington College. She is the author of six books of poetry, as well as the influential prose collection Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She has also translated and edited the works of early women poets in The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu and other books. Hirshfield has said "I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once– heart, mind, voice, and body."

In this recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, January 10, Hirshfield begins with "The Poet," from her 1997 collection Lives of the Heart. The remaining poems are all new and uncollected, including "First Light Edging Cirrus," "French Horn," "The Supple Deer," "Alzheimer's," "Left-handed Sugar," "Vinegar and Oil," "Sonoma Fire," "A Day is Vast," "One Loss Folds Itself Inside Another," and "A Hand is Shaped for What it Holds or Makes."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(16:09) / 8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Jane Hirshfield. Used with generous permission from Jane Hirshfield.

Photo by Sharon Mcgauley Maxine Kumin was born in 1925 and lives on a horse farm in rural New Hampshire. She has published sixteen collections of poetry as well as numerous books for children, four of which were co-written with the poet Anne Sexton. Kumin won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Up Country, and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1981-1982. Three new books by Kumin are forthcoming in the spring of 2010: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010; The Roots of Things: Essays; and What Color is Caesar?, a book for children.

In this January 10 recording from the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar, Kumin reads a selection of poems from the forthcoming New & Selected, including "Looking for Luck in Bangkok," "Praise Be," "The Nuns of Childhood: Two Views," "Rendezvous," "Jack," "The Final Poem," and "Seven Caveats in May."

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(15:45) / 7.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Maxine Kumin. Used with generous permission from Maxine Kumin.

Photo by Curt Richter Mark Strand was born in 1934 on Canada's Prince Edward Island and raised in the United States. He is the author of more than 10 collections of poetry, for which he has won the prestigious Bollingen and Pulitzer Prizes, among other honors. Strand has also translated the works of Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, edited poetry anthologies and collections of art criticism, and written three books for children. In 1990, he was named United States Poet Laureate.

This recording combines two readings given by Strand at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar. In the first, from Friday January 8, Strand reads a selection of poems spanning his career, including the early works "Sleeping with One Eye Open," "The Mailman," and "The Tunnel." Later works include "I Had Been a Polar Explorer," "Elevator," "Man and Camel,""Some Last Words," and two passages from the 1993 book-length poem "Dark Harbor" ("If dawn breaks the heart..." and "It is true, as someone has said..."). The first reading concludes with recent poems including "Fire," "Old Man Leaves Party," and "Black Sea." In the second reading, from Sunday January 10 (beginning at 20:35), Strand reads "Keeping Things Whole," two passages from "Five Dogs," "Two Horses," "Black Fly," "The Disquieting Muses," "Mirror," and "A Piece of the Storm." Strand's remarks in between poems provide context and explain references to cultural figures including the writers Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens, and the painter Giorgio De Chirico.

From KWLS 2010: Clearing the Sill of the World
(33:53) / 16.3 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2010 Mark Strand. Used with generous permission from Mark Strand.

"Clearing the Sill of the World," the 28th annual Key West Literary Seminar, was an extraordinary event. Seven U.S. Poets Laureate joined as many winners of the Pulitzer Prize, along with up-and-coming poetic talents and a truly remarkable audience of readers, writers, teachers, and poetry lovers of all stripe. Unseasonal rain and record low (sub-50°!) temperatures kept everyone away from the beach but it was just as well. This was an event you didn't want to miss a moment of. Some highlights:



Pulitzer Prize winners James Tate and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, and Robert Pinsky, took part in a panel discussion on Saturday morning entitled "A Poet's View: My Life in Poetry."



Tate and Komunyakaa had each other and the house laughing, as they discussed the perils of identifying one's self as a poet.



Komunyakaa: "Gender plays a part in it. You get these weird looks from other guys, you know, 'You write poetry!?'"



Tate: "I got to a certain point in life where I finally just said, 'Yeah, why not? I'm a poet."



New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon delivered a lecture and reading on the subject of "The Borderline." The moving account touched on Muldoon's boyhood in divided Ireland, the plight of a troubled schoolmate-turned-soldier, and Muldoon's appreciation for poetry that brings one up to and across borders.



On Sunday morning, Erica Dawson read a number of poems from her Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize-winning debut collection, Big-Eyed Afraid.



Fellow Poets Laureate Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur discussed the art of translation on Saturday afternoon with Rachel Hadas, Rhina Espaillat, and Robert Casper.



This year's named scholarships went to (from left to right), fiction writer Andrew Alexander, poet George Green, and poet Will Dowd.



A highlight for many in the audience was former Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin's "The Long Approach." The Sunday-morning lecture recounted the trials she and other women writers faced early in her career, explored the influences behind her long career as a formalist poet, and expounded on the joys of a life raising horses on a farm in New Hampshire.



Three-time Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky delivered Thursday night's keynote address, given each year in honor of noted novelist and World War II correspondent John Hersey.



Saturday afternoon saw Harvey Shapiro reading from his body of work, and talking about his poetic upbringing alongside the likes of George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky.



Todd Boss moderated a number of panels, led a writers' workshop, and read a selection of his work on Sunday.



Billy Collins gave a stellar early Saturday-morning reading of old favorites and unpublished work, including a new piece tentatively titled "The Hangover."



Kirby Congdon talked about his life and work.



Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey read movingly from her work on Saturday, and participated in the final panel Sunday afternoon





Rita Dove's stunning "How Does a Shadow Shine" weaved several poems from her latest Sonata Mulattica together with accounts of the real life of its protagonist, the 18th-century black violin prodigy George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.

Photos by Sharon McGauley.

Thanks to Bonnie Obremski for the quotes from Tate and Komunyakaa.

Photographer Curt Richter partnered with the Key West Literary Seminar for the third consecutive year to continue work on his series of portraits of American writers. Below is a sampling of the work Richter created this January in his temporary portrait studio at the San Carlos Institute.

Longtime Seminar volunteer Nick Vagnoni captured dozens of unique behind-the-scenes shots of this year's Key West Literary Seminar with his fisheye lens. This year's podium, above, was designed by Needham-Fatica, who also produced the printed program, and developed the KWLS website.



The auditorium of the San Carlos Institute, completed in 1924, seats nearly 400. With record-low sub-50° temperatures throughout the Seminar weekend, this was a good thing, as almost no one sought the usual escapes of sun, sea, and sand.



This year's set, designed by Michael Boyer of the Waterfront Playhouse, was an abstraction of Key West's vernacular architecture. A facade of louvered shutters opened onto window-scenes of subtropical flora and fauna, supported by distinctive gingerbread and spindly balustrades.



Melody Cooper and Dan Simpson, a.k.a. Private Ear, sat here, once again expertly handling sound recording and engineering for the Seminar and various receptions.



With an eye toward next year's Seminar on food in literature, famed cocktailier Jason Rowan flew in at the last minute to raise the bar with his inimitable libations. Recipes for a Richard Wilbur-inspired hot toddie and more can be found at his Embury Cocktails.



The view from the podium. Stagefright, anyone?

Photos by Nick Vagnoni.

photo by Nick Vagnoni

The final day of the 28^th Annual Key West Literary Seminar concluded with a panel discussion led by Timothy Steele on "the necessity of poetry." Panelists Erica Dawson, Rhina Espaillat, Rachel Hadas, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Natasha Tretheway were in accord regarding its essential nature. Poetry is a win-win, Hadas said. It is dynamic and a pleasure from all vantage points; writing, reading, teaching, studying, translating.

 

The topic was approached from a personal standpoint as well as a more universal perspective. Dawson began by saying how grateful she was to live in a world where events such as the Seminar make it possible to bring people together over a collective love for poetry. She also expressed the desire for poetry to be even more central in our culture. This was a sentiment echoed by many of the panelists. Dawson also said that poetry saved her. It was her way of organizing her thoughts and emotions in a productive manner. Hadas agreed that poetry is sometimes a life raft of language.

 

Hadas brought up Steele's point, made earlier in the Seminar, that people call upon poetry in difficult times as well as joyous times. It is a place where the public meets the private. Poetry, and all forms of literature, reminds us that we're not alone, that others have been through the same trials of life. It reminds us that the world is bigger than we are. Espaillat added that it is the glue between individuals.

 

Throughout the seminar, the topic of teaching poetry to children at an early age was emphasized. Many said that poetry was not taught to them explicitly until the college level. Espaillat called for the nurturing of a "culture of amateurs," which she recognized tends to have a negative connotation. In fact, Espaillat explained, an amateur is a lover of something. Poetry and art must be intrinsic in our culture.