Critical Symposium
The annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism was co-founded by David Rothman and Jan Schreiber in 2010 to address a growing sense that critical writing — reviews as well as more global discussions of the state of contemporary literature — has lost its way. Aware that many writers and critics wished to shine a light on an activity most essential to a strong poetic culture, to make it less routine and more conscious and probing, Schreiber and Rothman initiated a conference that brings together some of the foremost poet-critics now active to discuss problems, objectives, and associated artistic and technical issues.
This year’s symposium will take place July 28-30 during the Writing the Rockies conference, a writers’ conference that runs in conjunction with Western’s annual MFA summer residency. All MFA candidates are automatically enrolled in the conference. All other interested writers and critics are invited and encouraged to attend. If you have questions about the symposium, email drothman@western.edu. To join us, register for the symposium through Writing the Rockies.
Poetry Symposium Schedule
All sessions are in the Aspinall-Wilson Conference Center on the Western State campus.
Each speaker will have about 20 minutes to deliver a talk, which will be followed by another 20 minutes of discussion among the Symposium participants and the public. (See below for bios of each speaker.)
Friday, July 29 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m
(Northwest Conference Room)
E. Hilbert – “Shaping Free Verse”
M. Taylor – “Semi-Formal Verse and Its Prosody”
J. M. Wilson – “Classicism and Romanticism in 20th-Century Poetry”
Friday, July 29 2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
(Northwest Conference Room)
J. Schreiber – “Sources of Delight: What We Respond to When We Respond to Poetry”
D. Yezzi – “These Are the Poems, Folks”
J. Houlihan – “The I as Great Imposter: Confession, Monologue, and Persona”
Saturday, July 30 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
(Northwest Conference Room)
M. Krysl – “The Sestina: Playing for Time”
D. Rothman – “The Achievements of W. S. Merwin”
General Discussion
Papers from the first symposium were published in Contemporary Poetry Review. The organizers’ long-term goal is to produce a book-length collection of essays on criticism as the MFA and the Symposium grow and expand. In the introduction for Contemporary Poetry Review, Schreiber and Rothman wrote: “The very purpose of criticism has become murky: most reviews of poetry today offer blandly positive comments or, more rarely but just as annoyingly, knee-jerk negativity, without quoting enough of the verse at hand or producing enough evidence based on close textual reading to let the reader see what is being recommended or dismissed. If the poems have a discernible form, reviewers either ignore it, disparage it, or treat it as an obstacle the poet has heroically overcome. Most academic criticism — the kind published in quarterly journals — focuses on writers already accorded high standing and endeavors to further justify that standing. Certainly there are exceptions, as readers of this publication are aware. But even the best working critics — perhaps especially the best — have long perceived a need to articulate and reconsider the principles on which we operate.” Read the entire introduction>>
Biographies of Co-founders and Other 2011 Participants
David J. Rothman is co-founder of the Poetry Symposium and director of the Poetry Concentration with an Emphasis on Versecraft. He also teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver and frequently publishes poetry criticism. Over the last 30 years his poems and essays have appeared in Appalachia, The Atlantic, The Formalist, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, Light, Measure, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and scores of other journals. Read more about David Rothman on the faculty page.
Symposium co-founder Jan Schreiber has published Digressions (Aliquando Press, Toronto), Wily Apparitions (Cummington Press, Omaha), Bell Buoys (Aliquando), and two books of translations: Sketch of a Serpent and A Stroke upon the Sea. He was one of the founding editors of Canto: Review of the Arts. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines -– including the Southern Review, Hudson Review, Christian Science Monitor, and The Formalist -– and in online journals such as Expansive Poetry and Music and Not Just Air. Seven of his poems were set to music by Paul Alan Levi in a song cycle for tenor and piano called Zeno’s Arrow, which has been performed in Massachusetts and New York. Also a prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, he writes for Contemporary Poetry Review and other national publications.
Ernest Hilbert’s debut collection is Sixty Sonnets. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Boston Review, Verse, New Criterion, American Scholar, and the London Review. He graduated from Oxford University, where he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He was the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City (1998-2003) and, more recently, of the Contemporary Poetry Review (2005-2010), which has been described as “one of the most comprehensive online journals of literary criticism.” His poems have appeared in several anthologies, including the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets and two best-selling Penguin anthologies, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology and Literature: A Pocket Anthology.
His poems have been translated into several Nordic languages and are currently taught at a number of universities, including Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence, the New School, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and Drexel University. He hosts the popular blog www.everseradio.com and is an antiquarian book dealer in Philadelphia, where he lives with his wife, an archaeologist. Hilbert is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, the Royal Society of Literature (Somerset House, London), the Philobiblon Club, and is a voting member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Joan Houlihan’s most recent book of poetry is The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009). She is also author of Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays and The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Poetry, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast and Pleiades, among others, and has been anthologized in The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2005) and The Book of Irish-American Poetry–Eighteenth Century to Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). Her critical essays on contemporary poetry are archived online at BostonComment.com. She is contributing editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review.
Ms. Houlihan is founder of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts and of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference. She is on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marilyn Krysl has published eight books of poetry and four of short stories. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction and Sudden Stories. Dinner with Osama won the Richard Sullivan Prize and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Bronze Medal 2008. Swear the Burning Vow: Selected and New Poems was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2009. A former director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Colorado Boulder, she’s received two NEAs, taught ESL in the Peoples’ Republic of China, served as Artist in Residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked as an unarmed bodyguard for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, volunteered at Mother Teresa’s Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta, and tutored Boulder’s Lost Boys of Sudan in American slang. She’s taught hundreds of students who’ve brilliantly surpassed her, and now in her dotage teaches workshops, hangs out in the Caribbean with manta rays, watching clouds and anticipating the day she’ll forget her Social Security number. View Marilyn’s website>>
Marilyn L. Taylor is a MFA Advisory Council member and former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. She is currently a Contributing Editor for THE WRITER magazine, where her articles on poetic craft appear bi-monthly. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, one of which, titled Subject to Change, was recently nominated for the Poets Prize. Her award-winning work has appeared in a number of poetry journals and anthologies, including POETRY, The American Scholar, MEASURE, The Ledge, The Atlanta Review, The Cream City Review, Able Muse, Smartish Pace, Dogwood, and Mezzo Cammin, among many others. Read more about Marilyn Taylor on the faculty page.
James Matthew Wilson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He has authored many articles on philosophical-theology and literature, as well as essays in literary criticism, politics, and culture. A poet and critic of contemporary poetry, his poems has appeared in The Dark Horse, Modern Age, First Things, Lucid Rhythms, Measure, and other journals. He is currently at work on two books, one on T.S. Eliot and Jacques Maritain (The Return to the Real), and the other, a philosophical defense of truth, beauty, and the integrity of the intellectual life (The Vision of the Soul). He is an editor of the web journal, Front Porch Republic, and author of a book of poems, Four Verse Letters (Franciscan University at Steubenville Press, 2010).
David Yezzi is a MFA faculty member and executive editor of The New Criterion. His literary essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The (London) Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Read more about David Yezzi on the faculty page.
