May 2006

Greetings from Inkberry!

April was, predictably, a busy month for us. (What month isn’t?) We celebrated poetry at Papyri Books with a reading by three terrific regional poets. Our teen ‘zine workshop came to a fabulous end, with a celebratory reading at Cafe Topia in Adams last week. Our new summer calendars came out — glorious and green and leafy in design. We said farewell to our fabulous spring intern, Jess Falzerano (who bade us farewell on inkblog, here.) And now we’re ramping up for summer!

Inkberry’s summer season begins in the marvelous month of May, and we’re kicking it off with a fabulous pair of events featuring poet Anne Waldman.

On Saturday, May 13th, Anne will be teaching a workshop at Inkberry called Wide Awake Writing. Here’s what she has to say about the workshop:

What is the “logopoeia” or “dance of the ideas” in our writing? How do we include the “other” in the work? What is the difficult backdrop we write within or against in a war-culture? This workshop is designed to activate the “alternative” imagination through a series of experiments of attention, utilizing dream, cut-up techniques, memory-based exercises, performance, collaboration, documentation, cross-genre bending and more. To be a witness to our own mind, both its complications and natural inclinations toward responsibility and empathy, is the key to staying sane and creative in our various worlds. This workshop is designed for both beginners and seasoned writers.

Doesn’t that sound wild? (No wonder Allen Ginsberg called her his “spiritual wife”!) Anne is an amazing poet. She’s a founder of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery in NYC, and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and has taught poetry all over the world. The workshop will run from 11am-1pm and 2-5pm, and it’s an amazing opportunuty to create new work — and to get to know one of the literary luminaries of our age. You can sign up here: http://www.inkberry.org/store/

That evening at 8pm we’re presenting Anne in a reading at an entirely new venue for us: the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington! It’s our first-ever event in South County. In addition to Anne, the evening will feature special guests Ellen Doré Watson and Ilya Kaminsky. This event is co-presented with the Guthrie Center, where the event will be held — also known as the church in the song “Alice’s Restaurant!”

Anne’s books include the classic Fast Speaking Woman, the epic poem Iovis, Marriage: A Sentence, In The Room of Never Grieve (Selected Poems with CD) and the recentStructure Of the World Compared to A Bubble (Penguin Poets). She is also co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and editor of The Beat Book. You can find two of her poems here: http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/waldman.html

Ellen Doré Watson’s fourth collection, This Sharpening, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She serves as poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review and Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College. You can read one of her poems here: http://www.versedaily.org/slowleak.shtml

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa in 1977, to Jewish parents who had prospered against long odds: His paternal grandfather had been killed by Stalin, his grandmother sent to Siberia, and his father stolen from an orphanage and raised by an uncle. He arrived in Rochester in 1993, not speaking a word of English. Six years later, he was a Georgetown University graduate and the youngest writer-in-residence ever appointed at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. You can read several of his poems here: http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/featuredkaminsky.html

Tickets to the event are $7 ($5 for members of either Inkberry or the Guthrie Center.) Please join us!

And that’s just the beginning. Our summer season will go in other exciting directions, too. We’re offering online workshops in “Writing the Body” (taught by Josie Milliken) and “Writing the Novel” (taught by Susan Stinson) — read about those here: http://www.inkberry.org/workshops/online/

And, of course, June brings our grand fifth anniversary celebration, Inkstravaganza! (The invitation is featured on our main page, http://www.inkberry.org, and you can buy tickets at Papyri Books or in our online store.)

So stay tuned. Our fifth anniversary season is shaping up to be amazing.

I don’t know how many of you reading this were on our inklist five years ago, as we prepared for our first-ever event, a reading by poet Donald Hall at the Main Street Stage (a few doors down from where Inkberry now resides.) Just for kicks, I went poking through our inkmail archives, and read the edition of inkmail we sent out in May of 2001. Here’s the link: http://www.inkberry.org/news/archive/39.html

It’s a little bit awesome — in the traditional sense of the word, as well as the colloquial — to realize how far we’ve come in five years, and also how much of our original energy and enthusiasm for this work is still intact. Pretty neat, honestly.

It’s customary to close an issue of inkmail with a book recommendation. The most beautiful and resonant book I’ve read this month — indeed, in a long time — is Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which was recommended to me by Inkberry board member Rick Spalding many months ago, and which Inkberry’s artistic director Emily gave to me for my birthday this spring. Gilead takes the form of a letter written by aging Congregationalist minister John Ames to his young son, and it is measured, spare, and truly fantastic. I reviewed it on my blog, so if you’re interested in a longer meditation on what made the book so great, click on over.

The short version is, I was dazzled by it, and I couldn’t put it down.

And that’s the news from Inkberry! We hope to see you at one or both of the Anne Waldman events. (Sign up for the workshop soon — space is limited.) Drop us an email or drop in and visit sometime!

— Rachel