FEBRUARY 18 - MARCH 9, 2008Application Deadline: October 19, 2007CHASE TWICHELL, poet
Twichell views writing a poem as an act of questioning what it means to have human consciousness and the language to truthfully and accurately convey it, so that the finished poem throws a fresh and surprising light on what it means to be sentient. A practicing Buddhist, her poems reflect her spiritual practice within the ancient tradition of Basho and Dogen and the contemporary company of Gary Snyder and W.S. Merwin. Robert Hass wrote of Twichell’s poems that they are “full of sharp observation, …a sinewy intellectual toughness, and… a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity." In her most recent book, Dog Language, Twichell boldly announces its manifesto: To tell the truth, with no decoration, and with the remembrance of death. What holds us back, she asks, from saying things outright? From telling the plain picture: “the plain picture, / as Bob Dylan put it. / “Truth,” he said, “Why, / truth is just the plain picture.” Twichell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997, she won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. She was awarded a Smart Family Foundation Award in 2004 for poems published in the Yale Review. She’s taught at Warren Wilson College, The University of Alabama, Goddard College, Hampshire College, and Princeton University. In 1999, she left the academic world of teaching to start Ausable Press, an independent literary press dedicated to publishing contemporary poetry that “investigates and expresses human consciousness in language that goes where prose cannot.” “Chase Twichell has developed through five published collections an instantly recognizable poetic voice: soft-spoken, economical to the point of austerity, yet graced by flashes of wit and passion.” —Greg Johnson, The Georgia Review “Twichell’s carefully designed poems work like glancing blows and we walk away, only to discover that we have been touched deeply.” —Yusef Komunyakaa * For more information about poet Chase Twichell, please visits www.ausablepress.org/b_chase.html RESIDENCY STATEMENTMost poetry workshops tend to view the poem as a patient in a hospital, with a team of distinguished doctors discussing how best to fix whatever ails it. This method is often counterproductive for the poet because it fails to take into account how the poem came about, including all the other directions it might have gone (and still could go). I’m interested in the origins and evolution of poems, and in the development of their internal structures. This course will focus on ways we can go backwards and sideways as we write and revise, thus enabling us to find our way to a workable structure before we begin to polish and perfect a poem’s surface. Poets who would most benefit from this experience would be those who feel stuck in a rut, or who would like a crash course in the structural possibilities of poetry. Applicants should be prepared to generate new (rough) work, and/or be willing to try radical revisions of existing poems. APPLICATION REQUIREMENTSPlease submit five pages of poetry and a one paragraph statement about yourself as a poet and your specific interest in this course, as well as a resume. |
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Chase Twichell has published five books of poems: The Snow Watcher, The Ghost of Eden, Perdido, The Odds, and Northern Spy, and the co-edited The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach. She also has a book of translations of Tagore (with Tony K. Stewart), The Lover of God, published by Copper Canyon Press. Her newest book of poems is Dog Language, published in 2005, also by Copper Canyon Press. |