Nancy Greenaway, owl poet, is passing along the website of the Block Island Poetry Project and details of this year’s gathering.
From the website: “The Block Island Poetry Project is turning 10, and we are so excited about it that we are outdoing ourselves with a 4-day celebration featuring the usual fun and extraordinary work which has become our hallmark. In addition, we are honoring our decade together with an anthology of poems written during, or as a result of, Poetry Project workshops.”
The website continues, “Unpretentious, textured, authentic, practical, frisky… that’s who we are at the Block Island Poetry Project, and that’s why our series is like no other.”
The 2013 featured poets are Li-Young Lee and Coleman Barks.
According to poets.org, Lee was “born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, and relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. … ‘What characterizes [Lee's] poetry is a certain humility … a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over, a devotion to language, a belief in its holiness.’ ” More on Lee, here.
The Coleman Barks website says that he is “the author of numerous Rumi translations and has been a student of Sufism since 1977. His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series on PBS.” More on Barks, here.
The featured poets will be joined by a range of other poets, teachers, editors, and publishers. Rhode Island’s new poet laureate, Rick Benjamin, will also stop by.
(Perhaps one of my favorite Rhode Island poets, Kate Colby, will get to this workshop some year.)
