L I T T O R A L

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.

photo by Curt Richter

The John Malcolm Brinnin Memorial Event commanded a full house at the San Carlos Institute last night to pay tribute to Richard Wilbur, in whose honor this year's Seminar is being held. The evening began with a performance of two songs from the Broadway musical "Candide" by local singers Bruce Moore and Sandy Walters, accompanied by pianist Vincent Zito. First produced in 1956, Wilbur collaborated to write the lyrics with composer Leonard Bernstein and playwright Lillian Hellman.

 

Wilbur took the stage and was greeted by a standing ovation. He wintered and wrote in Key West beginning in the 1960s, and so he began the evening with a Key West poem, "Security Lights, Key West." The poem likens the "glare of halogen" on the yards of a quiet block to "the settings of some noble play." The "pitch-black houses," he concedes, may be the site of great drama, as well.

 

He went on to read two tender poems about love and his late wife, "For Charlee" and "The House." He also read from his forthcoming book, "The Anteroom." A portion of this book is dedicated to Wilbur's translations of riddles, and it was with great animation that he shared a few with the crowd. The riddle is a great from, he said, which unfortunately is usually seen only in nursery rhymes.

 

He went on to read his poem, "The Writer," for which the name of this year's seminar has borrowed his line "clearing the sill of the world." It was a great pleasure to hear him read this poem about his daughter,

 

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

 

He concluded the night's reading with short poems from his children's book "The Disappearing Alphabet." In this, he illustrates how detrimental the loss of a single letter would be. "For instance, any self respecting DUCK/ Would rather be extinct than be an UCK."

 

The evening ended with another standing ovation and murmurings from the audience for more. Afterwards, the crowd assembled at the historic Custom House for cocktails and dessert where Wilbur mingled amongst poets, readers, and writers.

Mark Strand and Richard Wilbur.


Robert Pinsky and Rita Dove.


James Tate and Yusef Komunyakaa.


Paul Muldoon.

Photos by Sharon McGauley.

Billy Collins spoke this morning on the relationship between poet and reader. This relationship is intimate and one that Collins is acutely aware of when writing. The maximum occupancy for a lyrical poem, Collins said, is two, the poet and the reader.

 

He divided contemporary poetry into two camps. The first is poetry where the poet is aware of the reader's presence, and in the second he is not. The first are dogs, the second cats, he illustrated in metaphor. For Collins poetry is a social encounter. He makes a practice of including a prefatory poem in each of his books explicitly acknowledging the connection between poet and reader.

 

On a note to poetic form as discussed yesterday, Collins said that form is what makes poetry sociable by including the reader. Free verse also has formal properties, he said. In his revision process, he often alternates between writer and reader in order to check his self-expressive urges with an objective other.

 

In his writing workshops, he will often tell his students, "Nobody cares about you." Self-expression is wildly overrated. Readers of poetry are interested in the poetry, the poetic form, not the poet. For this reason, a poet's awareness of his reader is critical.

Photo by Sharon McGauley.

 

Mark Strand

Rita Dove

Erica Dawson and Rhina P. Espaillat


James Tate


Richard Wilbur

Photos by Sharon McGauley

photo by Sharon McGauley

Timothy Steele gave a talk yesterday on the pleasures of metrical writing. This was a topic that many of the poets touched on throughout the day in their readings and panel discussions. In fact, Rhina Espaillat quipped that she invented meter as a schoolgirl when she first discovered rhythmical pattern (ta-tum ta-tum ta-tum ta-tum) in the poetry her teacher read. In the same panel, Maxine Kumin was quick to correct Espaillat that she beat her to it ten years prior when she invented meter. This pursuit of shapeliness, form, movement, and music is at the very heart of writing poetry.

For Steele, it is essential that poets today not abandon meter completely. It is not enough for young readers and writers to go back to old masters of verse such as Shakespeare for this metrical pleasure. There must be a spark of emulation from today's living writers for the next generation of poets to use meter in a way that is relevant and modern.

Meter is an enchanting fusion of order and disorder, Steele explained. It is a sensuous purchase on language. Meter is set. Irregularity is presented with words, phrases, and syntax. It is not necessary to analyze rhythm, per se. One can let it happen. Maxine Kumin also noted that form is used and complied with, but also violated.

Yusef Komunyakaa likened poetry to carpentry. In both pursuits there are a particular set of tools at hand to create something that functions. Each is admired for its precision in composition. He noted the visceral use of the hands in both pursuits as messengers of the brain formed through accidental perfection. For Komunyakaa, energy is the soul of poetry.

Steele asserted that meter stops you and asks you to check your inspiration. It is an instrument of discovery. It is meter that gives a poem its shape. Metrical pleasure is what allows a poem to seep into your consciousness time and again, recalling upon it in moments of joy or sorrow.

After the long trip to Key West, the audience for the 28th annual Key West Literary Seminar settles in to the San Carlos for the afternoon registration.



Long-time volunteer Eloise Pratt again helped out at the registration tables. Here, Eloise models a vintage 1989 KWLS sweatshirt.

Photos by Curt Richter

From top to bottom: William Kennedy,
Silas House, Annie Dillard, Billy Collins Photographer Curt Richter arrives in Key West from Helsinki, Finland, this week to continue work on his new series of portraits of American writers.

Richter first visited Key West in 2008 as an Artist in Residence at The Studios of Key West. He set up a temporary portrait studio in the organization's Mango Tree House, where he invited members of the community to sit before his camera. In partnership with the Key West Literary Seminar, Richter also photographed a number of the writers speaking at that year's New Voices Seminar. A selection from hundreds of these portraits resulted in Still and All, a collaborative project combining 20 of Richter's portraits with the literary talents of over a dozen writers, who penned fictional 'biographies' to accompany each portrait. Richter returned for last year's Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth, arranging portrait sessions during the Seminar with writers including Gore Vidal, William Kennedy, and Barry Unsworth, as well as many members of the community.

Richter's growing body of new portraits promises to join his Portrait of Southern Writers as one of our time's compelling photographic records of American writers. We are delighted to welcome him back to Key West and the 28th annual Literary Seminar to continue this important project.

Time permitting, Richter will also be scheduling portraits with members of the community. Attendees of the Seminar may feel free to talk with Richter or Arlo Haskell to coordinate a session.

The program book for 2010 features cover art by Annie Dillard and previously unpublished work by poets including Kay Ryan, Billy Cllins, James Tate, and Paul Muldoon. An extraordinary assembly of American poets will gather for the 28th annual Key West Literary Seminar, January 7-10, 2010. "Clearing the Sill of the World: a celebration of 60 years of American poetry" will feature seven United States Poets Laureate- including Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, Mark Strand, and Robert Pinsky- along with more than a dozen other top-tier poets including New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, and Pulitzer Prize winners Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and James Tate. Our guest of honor at the four-day Seminar will be Richard Wilbur, himself a former Laureate and the only living poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize twice.

While the majority of the event is sold out, there will be ample room for the public on Sunday January 10, when KWLS presents a free-and-open-to-the-public session. This program, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. at the San Carlos Institute, 516 Duval Street, will feature the laureates Collins, Dove, Strand, Kumin, and Wilbur, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners Komunyakaa and Trethewey. Admission is free of charge, with seating available on a first-come, first-served basis. The public is encouraged to arrive early; a line will begin forming around 1:00 p.m.

The Seminar begins with a keynote address by Robert Pinsky on Thursday January 7 at 7:45 p.m at the San Carlos Institute, 516 Duval Street. Registrants can sign in and pick up their welcome packets at the San Carlos from 1:00 - 5:00 p.m. that same day, and again from 7:00 - 7:30 p.m. A complete schedule of events is available for download here. The complete roster of speakers, including links to biographical information and resources from around the web, is available here. The Writers' Workshop Program will take place January 11-14.

This year's program book features artwork by Annie Dillard, Jack Smith, and Hank Feeley. For the first time, the book also includes new and previously unpublished work– by Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, James Tate, Maxine Kumin, Paul Muldoon, and others.

Littoral will feature live reporting and photography from the Seminar each day. Audio recordings will be available in the weeks following the Seminar.

For more information, call 1-888-293-9291. For media inquiries, including requests for press passes or interviews, write to arlo@kwls.org.

from left to right: Will Dowd, George Green, and Andrew Alexander The 2009-2010 winners of the Key West Literary Seminar's three named scholarships have been announced.

Will Dowd, a poet and MFA student at New York University with a master's in science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the Scotti Merrill Memorial Scholarship. A 2006 finalist for The Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Dowd's work has been published in Post Road Magazine, 32 Poems, and The Comstock Review.

George Green, an adjunct instructor at Lehman College whose work appears in The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, is the winner of the Marianne Russo Scholarship. Green is a graduate of Hunter College and The New School, and lives in Manhattan's East Village.

Andrew Alexander, a graduate of Vassar College and the Center for Writers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, has won the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award. A resident of Atlanta, Alexander's work has appeared in The Sun, The Mississippi Review, and The Chicago Quarterly Review, among other publications.

Winners of the Key West Literary Seminar's named scholarships receive full financial support to attend the Seminar and Writers' Workshop Program, and the opportunity to present their work during the Seminar program. The awards also cover travel and lodging expenses, and provide a stipend while in Key West. This year's poetry finalists were judged by special guest judge and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon. Fiction entries were judged by KWLS 2010 Program Chair Liz Lear and Robert D. Richardson, author of biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In addition to the named scholarships, KWLS provides limited financial support to teachers, librarians, and writers who would not otherwise be able to attend the Seminar and/or Writers' Workshop Program. In all, more than 50 scholarships were given this year, at a value of nearly $35,000. The program is made possible by endowments established by Joyce Johnson, Peyton Evans and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida, and The Dogwood Foundation; by the ongoing support of Judy Blume's KIDS Fund; and by the KWLS board of directors and the many individuals who support the organization.

Congratulations to all our scholarship recipients!

Richard Wilbur in his study in Cummington, Massachusetts. Photo by Arlo Haskell. Richard Wilbur's auspicious 1947 debut, The Beautiful Changes, earned the admiration of two of the most enduring American poets of the era, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. By the late 1950s, Wilbur had completed a landmark translation of Molière's The Misanthrope, and received the Pulitzer Prize for his third collection of poetry, Things of This World. Since then, Wilbur has received nearly every award and honor available to an American poet, including two Pulitzers, two Bollingen Prizes, a National Book Award, and the office of the U.S. Poet Laureate. His definitive translations of Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille represent nearly the complete output of these major figures of 17th-century French drama, and he has translated poetry by an astounding range of poets including the Portuguese Vinícius de Moraes, the Russian Anna Akhmatova, and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.

For parts of five decades, Wilbur and his wife Charlee spent winters in Key West. Here they became part of a cadre that included John Ciardi, the noted translator of Dante's Inferno, Pulitzer Prize-winning World War II correspondent John Hersey, two-time National Book Award-winning poet James Merrill, and poet, biographer, and social critic John Malcolm Brinnin.

Our interview began in February as a series of exchanges through the mail. On a sunny day in late August, I drove to visit Wilbur at his home in the Berkshires outside Northampton, Massachusetts. We had a lunch of turkey sandwiches with beets from Wilbur's garden and walked from the house to his study, an open structure with large windows and wall-to-wall bookshelves. On the windowsill is a pair of binoculars, and in front of the window is Wilbur's desk, topped with an early 20th-century L.C. Smith typewriter and the blue folder containing the manuscript that will become Wilbur's next book of poems, due in the fall of 2010. Our conversation– about Frost, Stevens, Key West, Wilbur's practice, and his place in the republic of letters– follows.

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Littoral: You knew both Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost early in your career. How did you come to know them, and what was their influence on your work and career?

Richard Wilbur: When I went to Harvard Graduate School on the G.I. Bill after World War II, Frost was spending much of the winters in Cambridge, and my wife and I soon got to know him. He was kindly disposed toward Charlee because her great-aunt, Susan Hayes Ward, had encouraged him when he was obscure, and was always called by him "the first friend of my poetry." He took to me also, because I had many of his poems by heart, and when my first book appeared in 1947 he spoke kindly of it. We saw Robert– as he soon let us call him– frequently thereafter in Cambridge or in Ripton, Vermont, or at our house in Portland, Connecticut, once I'd begun to teach at Wesleyan. His poems always seemed to me to be a wonder and an inimitable model: I had no wish to ape his work, but it made me seek for a speaking voice, for meter and rhyme which worked as if by accident and for plain situations having overtones. In Stevens's work I was delighted by the gaiety of his flow of thought. I saw him rather rarely, but he was good to me and backed me for a Guggenheim in 1952; and I once had the honor of introducing him to a capacity crowd in Harvard's New Lecture Hall. His ability to combine "the imagination's Latin with the lingua franca et jocundissima" (as Stevens writes in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction") was something I sought after in my own way, and with gratitude for his infectious example.

L: Like Stevens and Frost, you ended up in Key West. What first attracted you to the place? Were you aware of their histories in the town?

RW: I well remember what drew me to Key West in the first place. It was the 1960s, and a colleague of mine at Wesleyan, the painter Samuel Green, said to me, "Why do you take winter vacations in remote places like Tobago, using up all your money on air fare? You ought to try Key West, our American subtropics." He asked if I liked the movie Bonnie and Clyde. "Well, yes," I said. "It's morally questionable, but, aesthetically, very pleasing." "Then you'll love," he said, "the combined beauty and tackiness of Key West." Sam was right. Charlee and I stayed at first at the Sun 'n' Surf Motel near Duval Street, which was quite empty in those days, nothing at all like what it has become. I remember, after we settled in, we sat out on the balcony in the heat and realized we were going to require a drink, something with tonic. I went out and trudged all over town looking for tonic water, but couldn't find any and had to settle for Tom Collins mix. "No tonic?" said Charlee. "Well, thank God. We've found a backwater."


The Sun 'n' Surf Motel, Key West, circa 1960s, where the Wilburs first stayed.      Later we bought a one-room apartment on Elizabeth Street, and then with some writer friends– John and Barbara Hersey, the Ciardis– we bought into a compound on Windsor Lane, to which we returned for as much as three months of every year until 2005, when my wife fell ill. We enjoyed the company of many good friends, and I always loved simply being able to wear shorts, to ride my bicycle, and to play tennis on the city courts in the middle of winter. I found the variety of Key West life very conducive to my work. It has some of the virtues of a city– there's always been a kind of art colony there in flux, and by now it has its own symphony orchestra, productions of plays– and then there are the boats, the fishing, that kind of thing. There's more of a cocktail society than is good for us, of course, but all you have to do is not attend all the parties. You can live in Key West in all kinds of ways.
     When we went down to Key West originally, I had no recollection that there was any connection with Frost. He wasn't much of a hotel dweller, whereas Stevens was practically designed to be a patron of the Casa Marina, that great old hotel on the ocean where he stayed.

L: Were you among the Anagrams players in Key West?

RW: Yes, I've played a lot of Anagrams. I was introduced to it as a child, but I wasn't an incessant player until I began playing in Key West with people like John Malcolm Brinnin and John Ciardi– a devoted and violent Anagrams player. There's a long list of people who became devoted to the game: Jimmy Merrill played a little with us, Harry Mathews, Rust Hills, Irving Weinman, and each of the players took turns hosting the weekly game. John Hersey played– he knew all the names of all the fish in the sea, and he was very good at any word connected with boats and fishing– and after a certain amount of exposure to the game John wrote a story about it, published in Key West Tales. We tried to keep it a high-minded, good-tempered game. There were no wagers, but we did begin to have certain rules that were above and beyond the rules of the game itself. It was understood, for instance, that you would not have any Bass Ale, which came to be the official ale of these games, until the first of two rounds was over.

L: What was your reaction to being named U.S. Poet Laureate in 1987?

RW: I came to it not knowing what the assignment was. I appeared in the door of the Laureate's office down there, and there were the two fine secretaries who handle the Laureate's affairs, and I said, "Here I am, reporting for duty. What am I supposed to do?" And they said, "You're supposed to think that up." So I said, "Well, I suppose this is an honor. Should I just go home and write more poems for them to honor?" They said "No, that will not do."

L: What are you reading these days?

RW: I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and other poets of that period– which is to say my period– because I'm in the funny position of being about to teach my contemporaries at Amherst this fall, with my old friend David Sofield. We'll co-teach the course, beginning with W.H. Auden, and proceeding through Bishop, Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath. It's going to be difficult for me to turn myself into a considering, evaluative teacher of the works of people I knew so well, so personally. And I shall have to try hard to avoid being an old anecdotalist, telling stories on my old friends and acquaintances.

L: Are you writing poetry now?

RW: Yes. I don't manage to write something every day, but I never have. I wait to be asked, more or less, and when something wants to be written I make sure that I've cleared the decks and that I concentrate on that alone and give it as many hours as it will need. I'm a terribly slow worker, but I'm also terribly patient, and I'm glad that I still have the ideas and the patience to execute them. I'm going to have another book next year, in the fall, and three of its poems will be in The New Yorker next week. The book will have translations as well; I have 37 more riddles by Symphosius for the volume, and I've finally satisfied myself with a translation of Stéphane Mallarmés famous sonnet "For the Tomb of Edgar Poe."
     I almost always have some translation project going to keep me busy in between visits from the muse, but at the moment I don't. There's no use looking at Molière anymore; I've done all of his verse plays that I'll ever do. The only one I haven't done is a lemon, and I don't want to try it. I just published with Houghton Mifflin / Harcourt two new translations of Corneille's plays, "The Cid" and "The Liar," and I've been considering other plays by Corneille and a couple of possibilities from Racine. It is good to have something honorable to toil at when you've not been visited by an inspiration.
     As embarrassing as that word is– "inspiration"– I do think it corresponds to my experience. A poem comes looking for me rather than I hunting after it.

L: Do you prepare yourself for these visits? Do you sit at the desk and wait?

The Florida State Department's Division of Cultural Affairs has awarded the Key West Literary Seminar a grant for more than $20,000. The award, part of the DCA's Culture Builds Florida Grant Program, is designated for the expansion and enhancement of the KWLS Audio Archives Project.

Begun in late 2007, the Audio Archives Project aims to preserve and promote the recorded history of the Key West Literary Seminar, which contain more than 20 years of unique presentations by some of the world's most influential writers. More than 50 such recordings have already been digitized and released through the project, which is freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

Together with matching funds from KWLS, the Florida Builds Culture grant marks a significant investment in the project and will ensure its viability for years to come. Funds will be used to digitize fragile analog recordings and develop a mobile-optimized platform that will allow iPhone and other mobile device users greater access to the archives. The award will support KWLS investment in audio production equipment, as well as the development of initiatives and partnerships aimed at increasing use of the archives among educators, students, and readers worldwide.

The Audio Archives Project is one of more than 100 project-specific grants awarded statewide by the Division in 2009. Granted projects demonstrate cultural excellence and innovation, sustainability, and effective program management in support of the Florida Council on Arts and Culture’s strategic plan for the continuing development of arts and culture in the State of Florida.

We are delighted to announce the theme for the 2011 Key West Literary Seminar. "The Hungry Muse: an exploration of food in literature" will bring together dozens of today's most compelling, thought-provoking, and funniest writers– memoirists, novelists, poets, historians, journalists, and all manner of lettered gastronome, gourmand, and epicure– to explore food and its place in contemporary literature. Confirmed speakers for the 29th annual event include humorists Calvin Trillin and Roy Blount, Jr., acclaimed memoirist and Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, novelists Bich Minh Nguyen and Diana Abu-Jaber, American Food Writing editor Molly O'Neill, and poet Kevin Young.

The subject of what we eat- and how and why we eat it- lies at the heart of good writing of all genres. When asked why she wrote about food, the incomparable M.F.K. Fisher answered, "It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and intertwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one."

With demand for this Seminar high, "The Hungry Muse" will encompass two independent Seminars, from January 6-9 and January 13-16, as well as a slate of writers' workshops January 10-13. Many more speakers, as well as writers' workshop faculty members, will be announced in the coming months. Registration is now open. Advance registration is strongly encouraged, as an early sell-out is likely.

photo by Curt Richter Barry Unsworth's body of work is marked by scrupulous historical research and compelling narratives. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Unsworth discusses the impulses, instincts, and concerns that drive his fascination with history. The often intimate discussion suggests that Unsworth's chief aim as a novelist is to explore the ethical complexities of humankind as presented in the customs and sensibilities of distinct historical periods.

"The past is another country, we know. It's not recoverable. Even our own past, our own childhood is not recoverable. We know that we can't get back to it, but we know at the same time that we've never lost it. We know it belongs to us because it has made us what we are."

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(28:19) / 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. © 2009 Barry Unsworth. Used with generous permission from Barry Unsworth.

photo by Isak Tiner Patricia Engel was the winner of the Key West Literary Seminar's Marianne Russo Scholarship for 2009. She subsequently signed a two-book contract with Grove/Atlantic, which will publish Vida, a collection of short stories, in 2010. Engel's short story "Madre Patria," workshopped at KWLS 27 with Hilma Wolitzer, is forthcoming in Quarterly West, while "The Bridge," which debuted at the Seminar, will appear in print in The Atlantic Monthly's 2010 Fiction Issue.

On this recording from 2009, Engel reads from "The Bridge," about a father who throws his young son off Miami's Rickenbacker causeway.

     "When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing. It was after midnight, but this was nothing unusual. The Rickenbacker bridge hanging over Biscayne Bay was full of night fisherman leaning over the railings, catching up on the gossip over beer and fishing lines, avoiding going home to their wives. Except Hector didn't bring any fishing gear with him."

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(7:11) / 3.4 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. © 2009 Patricia Engel. Used with generous permission from Patricia Engel.

photo by Nick Rosza Jane Hirshfield has been added to the roster of speakers for the sold-out Key West Literary Seminar this January. She will also offer an advanced writers' workshop, bringing the total number of workshops offered to seven.

Hirshfield's most recent book of poetry, After, was named a "best book of 2006" by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England's Financial Times. She has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets.

The workshop, January 11-14, 2010, will be limited to 12 students and will include writing experiments, close-reading responses to poems, and conversation on craft. The goal, according to Hirshfield, is "to bring an open, intimate, and tenacious looking to words, worlds, and the craft-informed relationship between them where poetry begins," and to become aware of "the nameable elements of craft that underlie poetry's power to conjure, transform, delve, evoke, counter, move, unravel, expose, augment, and surprise."

photo by Curt Richter Barry Unsworth is the English-born author of 16 novels, most recently Land of Marvels, a historical novel set in Mesopotamia on the eve of World War I. Three of his books have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including Sacred Hunger, which is concerned with the 19th-century Atlantic slave trade and won the prestigious award in 1992.

In this recording of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar John Hersey Memorial address, Unsworth outlines his thoughts on the nature of truth in works of fiction. On the one hand, argues Unsworth, the novelist must strive for accuracy in relating the historical facts of a period. On the other hand, "the writer of fiction should be seeking a larger truth, a purer truth." In pursuit of this aesthetic aim, the author strives to appeal to the reader's experience and intuition, and so may take liberties with "the categories of factual falsehood or truth." In making his case for an "economy of truth," Unsworth cites authors Mark Twain, Umberto Eco, and D.H. Lawrence, as well as British spy-turned-author Peter Wright.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(39:49) / 18.3 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. © 2009 Barry Unsworth. Used with generous permission from Barry Unsworth.