2024 Virtual Speaker Series
I Learn by Going Where I Have to Go: Conversations with Writers about their Influences and Models
About the series
In 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.
About this session
Coming to poetry originally from prose, Rick Mulkey will discuss what it was about the lyric form that drew him to poetry, specifically lyric description, musical matters, and how the isolated human gesture comprises the central concern of the lyric poem. He will discuss the works of several poets and examine their influence on his work, including poems by James Wright, Seamus Heaney, Linda Gregg, and Albert Goldbarth. Q/A will follow.
About Rick Mulkey
Rick Mulkey is the author of six collections, including All These Hungers, Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. Individual poems and essays have appeared widely, including Poetry East, Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily, and the anthologies American Poetry: the Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. With Denise Duhamel he co-edited the anthology Ice On a Hot Stove: A Decade of Converse MFA Poetry. His awards include the Hawthornden Fellowship, the Charles Angoff Award, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize. Mulkey is director of the Converse Low Residency MFA.
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