FOTR Weekly: Carol Barrett on the healing poem, the Saginaw Chapbook Project, and a look at the next Speaker Series segment
“A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!”
– Theodore Roethke, “Child On Top of a Greenhouse”
The windy, overcast setting of “Child On Top of a Greenhouse” is all too familiar these days in Saginaw. While “everyone” in this week’s Roethke poem excerpt was “pointing up and shouting” at a child sitting on top of a greenhouse, I find myself pointing up and shouting when the sun comes out lately. As spring fights off the last vestiges of winter here in Michigan, join us for these upcoming virtual speaker series events from the cozy comfort of your home.
Upcoming this Week
Speaker Series on April 19:The Healing Poem: How Does it Work?
with Carol Barrett
Poetry as a means to healing has a long history. As far back as 400 BCE, the Ancient Egyptians used writing as medicine. Walt Whitman also read poems to soldiers wounded in the Civil War, whom he helped care for in the field hospitals. More recently, poetry therapist John Fox wrote that “there is something deeply personal and private about poetry-making. It is a journey into the depths” (Finding What You Didn’t Lose, 1995).
So we know that poetry has a longstanding reputation as a therapeutic tool, but how exactly does this work? We don’t have all the answers, but speaker Carol Barrett will enrich this discussion with an inquiry into the function of poetry in healing. Borrowing from psychologists, poets, and poetry therapists; frameworks from various disciplines and perspectives; and her own personal experiences, Carol Barrett will provide an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the healing poem. Join speaker Carol Barrett on Zoom Tuesday, April 19, at 7pm to explore the healing potential of poetry and learn how you might use it in your own life!
Final Day to Submit to Saginaw Chapbook Project is April 19:
An Update for Poetry Workshop Participants
Though we are past the April 15 submissions deadline, we will accept submissions from poetry workshop participants through tomorrow, April 19. Take this last chance to submit your poetic projects and lyrical labors if you haven’t yet – we’re looking forward to reading and publishing the work you share with us!
Looking Ahead
Speaker Series on April 26:From Muck We Came, and to Muck We Shall Return: The Midwest, Father-Loss, and Theodore Roethke
with Diane Seuss
Join poet Diane Seuss via Zoom at 7pm on April 26 for an intimate conversation about the powerful influence of Roethke’s life and poetry. In her own early education as a poet, Diane Seuss describes that Theodore Roethke was the first writer whose images and obsessions felt powerfully familiar to her, from the details derived from the Michigan landscape — “A slow drip over stones, / Toads brooding wells…Snail, snail, glister me forward, / Bird, soft-sigh me home” — to the shared “old wound” of early father-loss. Seuss will explore the connections between Roethke’s poems — especially those in The Lost Son, and Other Poems — and his Michigan childhood, the complex loss at the heart of his work, the seasonal shape of his psychological and spiritual journeying, and the details of landscape, greenhouse, and root cellar that supplied him with his core images and poetic purposes. She will also consider the permissions Roethke’s work provided her, and the mucky, Midwestern source of her own imagination.
Praise for Diane Seuss’ latest collection, frank: sonnets
“Just as Shakespeare immortalizes the “fair youth” of his sonnets, Seuss immortalizes the outcasts: their suffering, their songs, their Sublime. This is the work of an unusual and stellar American poet.”
– Thomas Mahon of Harvard Review
“Seuss’s sonnets go beyond questions of tradition or contemporary poetics. They are a reinvention that’s far greater than the sum of their parts. Deeply personal, brutally direct, funny, painful, and always wondrous, sometimes it seems the only thing that makes these sonnets is fourteen lines per page.” – Mandana Chaffa of Split Lip Magazine
“Seuss has created a technically exquisite, beautifully painful book. It’s a cohesive piece, not merely a collection of poems, and reading it is an experience of falling into a controlled flow of personal history and loss.” – Annette Lapointe of New York Journal of Books
New Speaker Series Segment Preview: The Power of Language
moderated by William Barillas
Diane Seuss is the final speaker in the Health and Wellness segment of our 2022 Virtual Speaker Series, and her Roethke-focused event will transition us nicely into our final segment of the current series, titled The Power of Language. This segment begins in May and will feature contributors to the critical anthology A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, edited by William Barillas and published by Ohio University Press in 2021. Each week, William will introduce one or more contributors who will speak about the Roethke poems they address in their anthology contributions.
About William Barillas, Our Power of Language Moderator
William Barillas is the editor of A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (Ohio University Press, 2021) and theauthor of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland (Ohio University Press, 2006), as well as many essays in scholarly and literary journals. His areas of focus include American literature, particularly literature of the Midwest, with special concern for poetry, environmental literature, and Latinx literature.
In 2013, The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature awarded William Barillas the MidAmerica Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Study of Midwestern Literature, and his book The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland was the winner of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature/Ohio University Press Book Prize.
Please note: our speaker series will continue to be hosted virtually via Zoom. Check out these exciting events and register to attend here, and stay tuned for more information in next week’s blog post.
Special Thanks & Additional Info
Thank you to everyone who attended Carol Barrett’s April 12 workshop, Defining Moments: Narrative and Image in the Emotional Shift Poem. This event concluded our current poetry workshop series in support of the Saginaw Chapbook Project, and we hope your time learning about the emotional shift poem was inspirational. Don’t forget to submit your polished drafts to the Saginaw Chapbook Project!
For the last time, let’s give our workshop facilitators an at-home round of applause. They’ve graciously volunteered their time to run these workshops and support community writers, in addition to managing the responsibilities in their regular busy lives. Thank you Carol Barrett, Jared Morningstar, and Anita Skeen for everything you’ve done and continue to do for us and the community through these workshops and more. We feel so fortunate to have you working with us on the Saginaw Chapbook Project!
To those of you who have already submitted your work and those of you still working out those final edits, give yourselves a round of applause! Writing is no simple or easy task, and the poems we write about our lives, thoughts, and feelings can bring up a lot of difficult memories and emotions. Congratulations for putting one word in front of the next, wherever you are in your journey as a poet.
For more from Carol Barrett, check out this review of her book Pansies (purchase here) from Mom Egg Review, and read a sample of her poetry at The Grief Diaries.
For a couple samples of Diane Seuss’ work, check out her page at The Poetry Foundation. To purchase her poetry collections, see the following links: frank: sonnets; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl; Four-Legged Girl; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open; It Blows you Hollow.
Visit William Barillas’ Ohio University Press author page to read more about him and purchase his books.
Thanks to generous support from Michigan Arts and Culture Council, Arts Midwest, Ohio Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts, our events are free and open to the public through May 31, 2022.
Kellie Rankey holds a BA in Creative Writing from SVSU, where they currently remain a student. Their work has appeared inThe Normal School,Tiny Molecules, and theMichigan Sociological Review, and is forthcoming from Wrongdoing Magazine.