2024 Virtual Speaker Series
I Learn by Going Where I Have to Go: Conversations with Writers about their Influences and Models
About the series
On one of Theodore Roethke’s most well-known villanelles, “The Waking,” he repeats four times, with variations, “I learn by going where I have to go." We can all reflect on the work of writers who have been influences on our own writing and our lives, either in their general approaches to the craft or in specific poems.
In this series, four well-established poet teachers will share poems and stories from the writers who helped shape their craft and approaches to poetry, along with sharing their own poems where they see the influence of these models and mentors. Help us celebrate National Poetry Month 2024 by joining in these conversations. There will be time for questions and comments from participants before the session concludes. Sessions will meet each Tuesday in April from 7:00 to 8:00 PM ET.
About this session
Anita Skeen will briefly discuss how she came to poetry and what poets she was drawn to in her early years, with a primary focus on the work of Margaret Atwood and Lisel Mueller—poets with whom she first had a professional and then personal relationship. Skeen will explore several specific poems of Atwood and Mueller while tracing that influence to poems of her own. There will be time for questions at the end of the session.
About Anita Skeen
Anita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she is the Founding Director of The RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books.
She is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014,With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008). Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Collaboration is an important aspect of her work and she is currently involved in writing projects with poets Jane Taylor and Cindy Hunter Morgan. With linocut artist Laura DeLind, she has recently completed a poetry manuscript, Even the Least of These: The 10-line Poem in the Time of Crisis.
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