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Poetry: The Muses Workshop

co-ordinator Alicia Stallings

  June 13 – July 2 2010

The Program

The Muses Workshop poetry seminar on the island of Spetses is a three- week session focusing on the writing and appreciation of poetry, in the land where Western literature was born, and which has continued to inspire English-language poets through the ages, from Byron and Rupert Brooke to James Merrill and Seamus Heaney.

Join Alicia Stallings and visiting poets for workshops in an idyllic island setting. Explore how contemporary poetry can flourish rooted in the fertile soil of ancient myth and modern Greece.  Afternoons and weekends are free to read and write and soak up inspiration from the sun and sea.

Roger Green, reading on Spetses in 2008

While participants are welcome to bring old material to the "workshop," the three-week program emphasizes producing drafts of new work, with an eye to exploring myth and form, and in the context of reading and discussing poetry (in English translation) from or inspired by Greece, from ancient to modern times, Homer to Heaney, Cavafy to Merrill.  Classes meet 9 am- 12 pm Monday through Friday.  Afternoons and weekends are free to muse, write, read, swim, explore or travel.  

Participants are welcome to bring laptops (with adaptors:  Greece is 220v to USA's 110), although it is necessary to go to one of the island's internet cafes to print.  Internet cafes also offer word processing.  Photocopying is available on the island, but tends to be rather expensive.  Participants who wish to bring older poems for workshopping are encouraged to bring copies with them. Poems are shared by reading aloud, and focused listening, rather than passing work around, though a whiteboard is available to go over difficult passages.  We have found this method, which might be new to some participants, to be very effective.

 Applicants are encouraged to send 5-7 pages of their own  poetry with their application and/or a short letter of interest..  Previous participants have included undergraduates majoring in other fields, as well as older poets with extensive prestigious publications to their credit, or people with a rekindled interest in writing after years of silence.  The workshop is also useful for teachers of writing mythology and literature.Because all participants face the blank page together for each new assignment, beginners are in the same position as expert writers.

In addition to other Athens Centre evening programs (such as Greek dance evenings), or theatre productions,the program features evening readings by  visiting American, British and Greek poets  and writers and are open to the public. Our schedule in recent years has included among others,  Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Rachel Hadas, David Mason, Jeffrey McDaniel, Stephanos Papadopoulos, Dinos Siotis, Maura Stanton, Trifon Tolidis Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Tony Barnstone, Judith Kleck, Richard Cecil, Roger Green, Stephen Yenser ,Sofka Zinovieff, Nikos Papandreou

Summer 2009 Spetses Poetry & Prose Evenings

Friday  June 19:  Adrianne Kalfopoulou, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Thursday June 25, A.E. Stallings Sofka Zinovieff
 
 July 1:  Tony Barnstone, Roger Green
 
July 3:  participant reading
(at Villa Alexia in Kounoupitsa area)

A. E. Stallings http://www.geocities.com/aestallings

All readings take place at 8pm, at the  Bouboulina Museum in the, unless otherwise indicated.  All readings are free and open to the public.  Wine and conversation follows the events.  For more information, please call 210.701.5242 /210.701.2268 , or 6976160133

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Reader Biographies

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, born in Athens, is one of Greece’s foremost poets and a distinguished translator.  She studied Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Nice, Athens and Geneva, and after graduating from Geneva in 1962 was awarded that city’s First Prize for Poetry.   She has read poetry and lectured at major universities and literary festivals in the USA, Canada, Mexico and across Europe.  In 1985 she was awarded the Greek State Award for Poetry.  Her latest book is Translating into Love Life’s End, translated by herself.

Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College and has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley. His books of poems include The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008, winner, Benjamin Saltman Award)[ Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to the chapbook Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks.  His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 2007); The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005); Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993); Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (UP of New England, 1991); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996); and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East (all from Prentice Hall Publishers).  He is the recipient of many national poetry prizes and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council.  Recently, he won the grand prize in the Strokestown International Poetry Festival in Ireland.

Roger Green is an English poet living on the Greek island of Hydra.  Among his publications are several books of poetry, including With It or On It (2000).  His translation of the Akathistos Hymn by Romanos the Melodist was published in 1987.  His recent book, Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen  (Basic Books), is a “fantastically discursive ode to obsession and myth, relayed in a series of digressions that prove far more illuminating-and life-affirming-than the facts laid bare.”  He has also published a new collection, The Pyrofani Poems.

Adrianne Kalfopoulou lives in Athens where she teaches literature at the Hellenic American University. She also teaches in the Scottish Universities Summer Schools Program at the University of Edinburgh.  Her publications include a poetry collection, Wild Greens, and a critical study, The Untidy House, a discussion of women's subversive discourses in American literature. Her memoir, Broken Greek: a Language to Belong, is available from Plain View Press, and can be ordered at www.plainviewpress.net.  Her second collection, Passion Maps, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2009, a Pavement Saw chapbook contest finalist, "The Ways We Do" will be also be published in 2009.

Alicia (A.E.) Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999.  Her first collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award.  Her second collection, Hapax, received the 2008 Poets’ Prize.  She was also recently awarded the 2008 Benjamin H. Danks prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her new verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, is out from Penguin Classics, and she has received an NEA translation grant for work on the Erotokritos. She is director of the  Poetry Writing Workshop organized by the Athens Centre on the island of Spetses each summer.

Sofka Zinovieff was born in England and is of Russian extraction.  She studied anthropology at Cambridge; then, after spells living in Russia and Italy, settled with her family in Greece, an experience which she describes in her first, highly acclaimed book, Eurydice Street (Granta Books).  Her latest book is Red Princess:  A Revolutionary Life.

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