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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

•••

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?

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."

From top left: Richard Wilbur, Natasha
Trethewey, James Tate, Mary Jo Salter, Mark
Strand, Kay Ryan, Timothy Steele, Robert
Pinsky, Maxine Kumin, Brad Leithauser, Paul
Muldoon, Harvey Shapiro, Yusef Komunyakaa,
Matthea Harvey, Rachel Hadas, Dan Gerber,
Rhina P. Espaillat, Rita Dove, Erica Dawson,
Kirby Congdon, and Billy Collins. A steady flow of registrations and a last-minute surge of extraordinarily talented applicants for the Scholarship Program has brought registration for the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar and Writers' Workshop Program to an official close. Those interested in attending may still sign up for the waiting list by sending an email to mail@kwls.org, and locals are reminded of the open-to-the-public session held on the Seminar's final Sunday.

The complete schedule for the 28th annual event– Clearing the Sill of the World, a celebration of 60 years of American poetry in honor of Richard Wilbur– is now available as a downloadable .pdf. Highlights of the January 7-10 program will include three-time U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's keynote address, "Modernism and Memory"; a panel discussion on translation including Wilbur, Mark Strand, and Rachel Hadas; a production of Wilbur's translation of Jean Racine's "The Suitors" by the Red Barn Theatre; and a conversation including Matthea Harvey and James Tate on "Giving shape and form and voice to the madness and strangeness and wonder of everyday life." The event will also feature readings and lectures by current Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, and Pulitzer Prize winners Yusef Komunyakaa and Natasha Trethewey.