Ed Skoog Community Poetry Workshop At GWU

This was our third meeting and our first where we read our poems which are supposed to be newly written work. For me the poems written in the workshop are lenses into the poets' views of the world and its inhabitants. It's thrilling to hear the poems of new poets you have only known a couple of weeks. I haven't done this in a while, so I (Miss Chemo Fog Brain in Recovery)

am having fun.

Skoogisms: Frost: "A poem is a momentary stay against confusion." Auden: "All bad poems are sincere." Keith Waldrop: "So are the good poems." Hugo: "Poetry must risk sentimentality." Skoog: "No cliche, ever."

I have to turn in a new poem next Tuesday. "Oh Muse, time for a visit."

Oranges And Sardines

Be sure to look for this on the web and for the print version at Amazon. I have the privilege of having a poem in the autobiographical issue just out and in the forthcoming issue. I put a link to my blogspot so I wanted to mention it here.

My other interesting news is that I am in the Jenny McKean Moore Community Workshop with poet Ed Skoog at GWU this fall. Kathi Wolfe is also in it so this makes it even more fun. I should be receiving Ed's first book "Mister Skylight" in the mail soon. This past Tuesday the class performed architectural maneuvers on a sonnet we'd written and were exposed to the concepts of chiasmus (a kind of doubling) and sidereal (the movement of the stars). I attended this workshop when it focused on fiction with Vikram Chandra in 1995. Next week: Still Life With Skull.