Virtual Poetry Seminars, Summer Edition, May to July 2013

The University of Iowa's International Writing Program has two poetry online sessions running for seven weeks. The first course i for strong and emerging poets while the Advanced class is for published poets. This is great, it's free and all you have to do is submit a resume, statement of purpose abd writing sample of 5 poems. Send these to iwpapplications@gmail.com. It is about opening doors to invisible people. Deadline to submit is 8 May and it is definitely worth it. According to the website at http://iwp.uiowa.edu/calendar/2013-05-08/applications-due-for-virtual-poetry-seminars-advanced-poetry-seminar-poetry-mast, there will be open discussions with the classics, the old and more modern and contemporary poets. International applicants are encouraged. you just need a reliable internet connection and headset. For the Masterclass, there will be radical ways of revising poems, don't we all need this? The course instructor is Micah Bateman who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' program and Nick Twemlow is the instructor for the Master class. enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The workshop was so ....dynamite

The workshop was hot. When I spoke to Ife Piankhi on phone, a Caribbean poet based in Uganda, I had no idea she was dynamite. Sh performed about her experience as a black person in the uk and wow, it was tremendous. Poetry is better once spoken off memory and she said we must read and travel a lot to different places in town , around the country and even across the borders.

Isaac T, coming from an academic background gave us the 411 of good poets to read like Leopold Senghor, Diop, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, T.S Eliot who broke the conventional rules and opened up creative free verse poetry. It was great.

Then we had the debate on if Okot p Bitek is the finest poets that Uganda has ever had, and we learnt about performance , in fact Susan Kerunen of Bayimba shared how she actually performed Okot's Song of Lawino.

As poets, it is also pertinent to have quiet time, we need solitude in order to get deep into ourselves. Being alone is not the same as lonely.Solitude is strength.
Poetry is quite divisive as well. A number of the participants thought that poetry must be performed while others did not and still some felt strongly about rhyming poetry and others not. It was great to go through the evolution of poetry and accept where we are and yet even stil some felt that contemporary poets had destroyed poetry and that we needed to go back to our old traditions. It was such an interesting diccussion. Onthe whole, poetry is about speaking about our environment and since that changes, so will poetry.
We may take the workshop to Pallisa next year after an invitaion from Hope, a poet from the region. We learnt a lot and yes, poetry can be done as a career, why not? If u believe it, why not? Thanks to Stitching Doen for making it all happen. And thanks to everyone that came.