| West Chester University Poetry Conference | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Formalist poetic craft conference |
| Frequency | Annual |
| Location(s) | West Chester University, West Chester, PA 19383, United States |
| Inaugurated | June 1995, West Chester, PA |
| Most recent | Tuesday,June 7–11, 2022 |
| Next event | Tuesday,June 6–10, 2023 |
| Participants | 300 poets and poetry scholars |
| Website | WCU Poetry Conference |
Program Director ContentsDana Gioia | |
The West Chester University Poetry Conference is an international poetry conference that has been held annually since 1995 at West Chester University, Pennsylvania, United States. It hosts various panel discussions and poetry craft workshops, which focus primarily on formal poetry, narrative poetry, New Formalism [1] and Expansive Poetry. It is the largest poetry-only conference in America [2] and possibly the world [3] as well as the only conference which focuses on traditional craft. [2]
The conference was founded in 1995 by West Chester professor Michael Peich and poet Dana Gioia with 85 poets and scholars in attendance. [4] The original core faculty members included Annie Finch, R. S. Gwynn, Mark Jarman, Robert McDowell, and Timothy Steele. While some of these faculty still return regularly to teach, the faculty has expanded in recent years to include Kim Addonizio, Rhina Espaillat, B. H. Fairchild, Rachel Hadas, Molly Peacock, Mary Jo Salter, A. E. Stallings, and many other widely published New Formalists.
Starting in 1999, the conference's program began including an art song concert. [4]
In 2003, Gioia stepped down as co-director of the conference in order to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The 2010 conference was the 16th and last year with Peich as director before he retired and passed the position to Kim Bridgford. [2] [5] By this time, the conference attendance had increased to 300 poets and poetry scholars. [4] That year's concert of art song featured Natalie Merchant, who sung the poetry of various poets of the past. [4] On June 12, the last day of the conference, the Queen's Birthday Honours 2010 were announced, including British comic poet Wendy Cope's appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. [6] [7]
R. S. Gwynn was named Program Director in September, 2015. His innovations included the initiation of a "Great Debates" series, the first of which, "Poetry or Verse?" was conducted by the poets James Matthew Wilson and Robert Archambeau.
Jesse Waters was named Program Director in January, 2018.
2020 saw no conference.
Every year, the WCU Poetry Conference gives out three Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards, the most notable one being the nationally-competitive Donald Justice Poetry Prize. The other two were given to recognize local regional undergraduate work in the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania until 2012, when they were expanded to become nationally-competitive prizes.
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Robert Elwood Bly was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His best-known prose book is Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and is a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.
John Anthony Ciardi was an American poet, translator, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet and translator of Dante's Divine Comedy, he also wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont, and recorded commentaries for National Public Radio.
Wendy Cope is a contemporary English poet. She read history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She now lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire, with her husband, the poet Lachlan Mackinnon.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.
The Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award is awarded to scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification. The award was named after the poet, critic, and translator Robert Fitzgerald. It was established in 1999 at the Fifth Annual West Chester University Poetry Conference. Each awardee has been interviewed at the conference by linguist and literary historian Dr. Thomas Cable of the University of Texas at Austin.
X. J. Kennedy is an American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. He was long known as Joe Kennedy; but, wishing to distinguish himself from Joseph P. Kennedy, he added an "X" as his first initial.
Timothy Steele is an American poet, who generally writes in meter and rhyme. His early poems, which began appearing in the 1970s in such magazines as Poetry, The Southern Review, and X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures, are said to have anticipated and contributed to the revival of traditional verse associated with the New Formalism. He, however, has objected to being called a New Formalist, saying that he doesn't claim to be doing anything technically novel and that Formalism "suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutually vital in any successful poem." Notwithstanding his reservations about the term, Steele's poetry is more strictly "formal" than the work of most New Formalists in that he rarely uses inexact rhymes or metrical substitutions, and is sparing in his use of enjambment.
Robert Samuel "Sam" Gwynn is an American poet and anthologist associated with New Formalism.
Charles Martin is a poet, critic and translator. He grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from Fordham University and received his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He now teaches at the City University of New York, Syracuse University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Martin's specialty is Latin poetry. Martin is also a New Formalist, and was an original faculty member of the West Chester University Poetry Conference.
Jared Carter is an American poet and editor.
Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet’s Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
Kim Suzanne Bridgford was an American poet, writer, critic, and academic. In her poetry, she wrote primarily in traditional forms, particularly sonnets. She was the director of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference, established in 2014 and first held in May 2015. She directed the West Chester University Poetry Conference from 2010-14.
Light is an online journal which bills itself as "America's oldest and best-known journal of light verse."
The Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing is a graduate program in creative writing based at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, United States. Stonecoast enrolls approximately 100 students in four major genres: creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and popular fiction. Other areas of student interest, including literary translation, performance, writing for stage and screen, writing Nature, and cross-genre writing, are pursued as elective options. Students also choose one track that focuses an intensive research project in their third semester from among these categories: craft, creative collaboration, literary theory, publishing, social justice/community service, and teaching/pedagogy. Stonecoast is one of only two graduate creative writing programs in the country offering a degree in popular fiction. It is accredited through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC).
The Donald Justice Poetry Prize is a prestigious national competition sponsored by the Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards of the West Chester University Poetry Center. It has been given annually since 2006 to an American poet for an unpublished book-length manuscript of formal poetry.
The Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards are three awards administered by the West Chester University Poetry Center and are given annually during the West Chester University Poetry Conference "to recognize the important role of arts and letters in American life." The Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards were named by Kean W. Spencer, who provided the initial endowment, after his mother.
Mezzo Cammin is a semiannual online literary journal devoted to formalist poetry by contemporary women as well as to bring attention back to work that was more famous in previous eras. The journal's title comes from Judith Moffett's poem "Mezzo Cammin", which in turn takes its title from the opening line of the famous Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Inferno. The journal is currently associated with the West Chester University Poetry Conference. The editor in chief is Kim Bridgford. Its advisory board consists of well-known poets such as Annie Finch, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson, and Molly Peacock.
West Chester University is a public research university in Chester County, Pennsylvania. WCU is the largest of the 10 state universities of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) and the sixth largest university in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The university is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
