Summer Salons
Acclaimed Poet
Major Jackson
with Award-winning Poet
Jane Hirshfield
Friday, September 6, 2024
Saturday, September 7, 2024
Friday, September 6, 2024
6:00 – 7:30 PM ET
Essential Companions: A Conversation in Poems
5:00 PM Reception
Daniel A. Mullin Courtyard
6:00 – 7:30 PM Salon Conversation
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
In this dynamic conversation, Jane Hirshfield and Major Jackson will discuss poems by others that have been the compasses and magnetic poles of their lives. In a considered exchange about the reach and sustenance of poetry, they will read poems of personal significance and broad engagement, poems that forge connections, poems that grieve and celebrate, and poems that ponder the unknown. In so doing, these two friends will begin to hint as to why poetry remains an enduring and evolving art of great human magnitude.
Saturday, September 7, 2024
2:00 – 4:00 PM ET
In-person Workshop with Major Jackson
Conversation Poems
A clarifying moment in the life of any artist is becoming aware of the conversations surrounding their work. For poets, possessing an approximate grasp of one’s attendant themes is a key component of their vision, as much as conscious efforts toward aesthetic innovation. Often, our poetry is in dialogue with other poets, thinkers, artists and even artistic periods. This instructional workshop surveys the various means by which poets leap from, pay homage to, challenge and elbow their way into conversations with their forbears. Students will generate a draft from one of four methods by which poetic exchange takes place. This class is open to all levels of poetry writing.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). He is the 2023 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. His other honors include fellowships from John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Major Jackson is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review and host of the podcast The Slowdown.
Saturday, September 7, 2024
2:00 – 4:00 PM ET
Virtual Zoom Workshop with Jane Hirshfield
Invitations, Inventions, Inventories, and Turnstiles
William Stafford described a writer as “not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” Almost anything can become the invitation and turnstile of discovery. Each new poem can invoke a deepened comprehension – or, sometimes as useful, a deepened incomprehension. One phrase can summon and sum a life’s moments or lengths, a culture’s storehouse of hard-won beauty and unfathomable failures. This generative writing workshop will look at some of the energies and sources through which new poems come into the world. There’ll be discussion, model poems showing some possible strategies, and workshop participants will write one, maybe as many as two or three, starts of their own.
Jane Hirshfield’s ten poetry books include the newly published The Asking: New & Selected Poems (September, 2023); Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Hirshfield’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award, The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Orion, and ten editions of The Best American Poems.
Proceeds from these paid events ensure that the Fine Arts Work Center is able to provide free arts and culture events for the Outer Cape Cod community year round.
