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Maggie Anderson featured at Next OPA Meeting

OPA Quarterly Meeting and Workshop
with guest poet Maggie Anderson

Saturday, December 18, 2010
Bexley Public Library
2411 E. Main Street
Columbus, OH 43209
 
Maggie Anderson is the author of four books of poetry, including Windfall:  New and Selected Poems, A Space Filled with Moving, and Cold Comfort. She has co-edited several thematic anthologies, including A Gathering of Poets, a collection of poems read at the 20th anniversary commemoration of the shootings at Kent State University in 1970, as well as Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and After the Bell:  Contemporary American Prose about School.  Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, fellowships from the Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts, and the Ohioana Library for contributions to the literary arts in Ohio.   The founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press, Anderson is Professor Emerita of English at Kent State University and a member of the graduate faculty of the Northeast Ohio MFA in creative writing.
OPA Meeting Agenda
10-11:30 a.m.OPA Business Meeting
11:30 a.m.-12 p.m.
Open mic period
12-1 p.m.
Lunch break
1-2 p.m.
Poetry Reading and Q&A Session

2:15-3 p.m.
"You Must Be Somewhere: Thoughts on Place in Poetry: Geography, Culture, and Metaphor"
 
Where would James Joyce have been without his Dublin?  Or Coleridge without his Kubla Khan?  Or Dante without Hell?  Many poets have found the deepest sources of their poetic voices in specific places.  This talk and discussion will focus on how place functions literally and geographically, culturally, and as metaphor in poems by James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, and other writers.  A focused lecture will be followed by a series of questions designed to provoke ideas about how place functions in our own poems.
 
3:15-4 p.m.
"Places, Everyone: A Poetry Workshop"
 
This workshop will offer an exercise/prompt specifically designed to lead to writing about place in a central way.  Participants will be invited to read what they write in this workshop.  There will also be some opportunity for participants to have a previously written poem that features a place critiqued.  If you wish to have your poem discussed, please come prepared to provide 20-25 copies for the group.
 
After the workshop, there will be a half hour open reading to conclude the afternoon's events and to foster the spirit of community and shared work among the participants.
 
Admission is free to members.  For additional information, email T.M. Gottl at TM@ohiopoetryassn.org.

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