Janet Hamill will offer a writing workshop titled “We are the Stars: The Magic and Wisdom of Indigenous Poetics” on Saturday, March 2 from 1:00 until 3:00 pm on March 2 at the Seligmann Studio, 23 White Oak Drive (across from the SLPAC, formerly the Lycian), Sugar Loaf, New York. The program is free and open to all. No preregistration is required.
Just as the visual art of indigenous peoples influenced Cubism, Surrealism, and all modern art, poets have learned from the verbal art and oral tradition of “primitive” cultures. Workshop participants will examine the marvelous writing of the native peoples of North America, Central and South America, Africa, Oceania and Australia as well as looking at the current enthusiasm for ethnopoetics in the work of contemporary poets.
Janet Hamill has been called “our Baudelaire” by no less a critic than poet and impresario than the Bowery Poetry Club’s own Bob Holman. She is a former thirty-year resident of NYC, where she got her start as a poet at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church-in-the-Bowery. She is the author five books of poetry, and her first full collection of short fiction, Tales from the Eternal Café , is forthcoming this fall from Three Rooms Press. She has also recorded two CDs of spoken word and music with the bands Moving Star and Lost Ceilings. Her work has been nominated for the William Carlos Williams Prize and the Pushcart Prize. She serves on the committee for the Seligmann Center for the Arts and is presently enrolled as an MFA candidate in Poetry at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire.
Following the workshop, Poetry on the Loose will present Marianna, Rachel, and Barbara Boncek, in Three Generations of Poets at 3:30 in the same space.
Hamill’s is one of a series of free open workshops to be offered by the Northeast Poetry Center’s College of Poetry on the first Saturday of every month of 2013. The College is for the present suspending its eight-week workshops, the Distinguished Visiting Poet program, and the Wawayanda Review.
The next workshop, on April 6, will be led by Will Nixon and will focus on writing about nature. Later programs will be led by Teresa Costa, Cheryl Rice, William Seaton, and others.
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