Ever notice the sensibilities of spilled milk– its silk skin wasted on the Kitchen floor? Are you certain to find rhyme linking the mundane to madness in our world? A poet’s journey to uncover rubies and gauntlets hiding behind its various stop signs, put up by glaring father figures in neckties, feels uncertain most of the time. So don’t travel alone, walk with us to the SoFA.
Chow Chat (15-20 minutes)
Who would ever sit on the sofa without some goodies to snack on? No one. That’s why the literature salon for SoFA will have baked treats, free for everyone to eat! And if you want a say in your dessert options, go visit our Instagram for the poll (I’m hoping the cakepops win).
Poets can easily turn the act mining for gems, and fellow creative friends, into a minefield of their own poetic destruction. We want everyone who sits at the SoFA to be relaxed, and you can’t do that on an empty stomach. Now is the time to get to know the people around you, and get some food!
Creative Circle (30 minutes)
Now that you’ve become familiar with the people you sit with, it’s time to push those square cushions into a circle and get creative! With our host guiding the conversation around literature using quick sketch prompts and conversation topics, this is the time to hold fast to those fleeting visions we so often dismiss. Use this moment to get/give critiques and praises, pitch new concepts, present, and perhaps even find another creative to collaborate with!
Topic conversations will pivot from unique ways of lighting dim tunnels through DaDa poetry and exercises inspired by real practices of fabulously beautiful poets such as Sharon Olds and Ruth Stone.
Artist Talk (20 minutes)
Guest Artist: David Kirby
Talking about: Furbelows, Lozenges, and Doohickeys. “It's about how to use the scraps and bits and bobs of ordinary life to get at the good stuff, the hidden gems and jewels that lie just under life's surface.”
To understand Kirby you have to understand that he was raised in "the rural south" by a polyglot "medievalist college professor" father with an obsessive passion for the works of Chaucer and a "farm-girl" mother turned elementary school teacher who "taught him how to shoot her single-shot .22 and paid him ten cents for every cottonmouth moccasin he knocked off" in aid of protecting the horses and sheep on their family's 10-acre property in Louisiana. He then went on to get his PhD at 24 at John Hopkins University.
Since then he’s been in The Paris Review (not just once either) The New York Times is obsessed with him to say the least, and America so firmly believes he is real-deal jewel of poetry that he has been featured in numerous anthologies, including several issues of Best American Poetry.
Kirby is the author of more than two dozen volumes of criticism, essays, pedagogy, and poetry. His numerous collections of poetry include The Ha-Ha (2003), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems (2007). In nominating Boulevard Street, the National Book Award committee noted, “Digression and punctiliousness, directed movement and lollygagging, bemusement and piercing insight are among the many paradoxical dualities that energize and complicate the locomotion of his informed, capacious consciousness.”
Q&A: Each presentation will be followed by a brief Q&A to open the dialogue between novices and established artists in the field.
Wonder Workshop (25-35 minutes)
The last portion of the Salon is dedicated to those who would like to flesh out their work and receive live feedback from seasoned editors of Kudzu Review, the official undergraduate magazine of Florida State University, The Eyrie Magazine, the official undergraduate magazine at Tallahassee State College, and FSView, the highly awarded on-campus magazine associated with Tallahassee Democrat. Lastly, we have nationally awarded poet of the Eber & Wein Poetry Contest, advising the Poetry exercises and workshops. This Written Arts Editor for this workshop (in order) will be Aidan Little, Grace Horner, Eve Murdick, and Ashe Cendere.
As we will learn from the Artist Talk, even established writers often find that their work is never truly done. Revision and editing is something that can go on forever if done alone, and working yourself into a rabbit hole by trying to piece the missing link between paragraphs isn’t going to get you any step closer to being published. So give someone else a look, we’d be happy to read. And who knows, we might suggest something you’d never even think of, unless you were with us— at the SoFA!