The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2016

In 2014, the Emily Dickinson Museum invited over 40 poets into Emily Dickinson's bedroom, the creative space where she wrote nearly all of her poems. The room was in the midst of a restoration that had stripped away the 20th century additions, leaving bare walls, the wood floors Dickinson had walked on and which had been covered by other flooring for nearly 100 years, and the outline of the original door to the room, plastered over in 1855. The space, while dilapidated, was as close as possible as anyone would ever get to Dickinson's own creative space. We wanted poets to experience this raw, powerful space, before the room was fully restored, and offered each an hour to write there. A book of those poems, A Mighty Room, will be coming out later this fall or early next winter, and we would love to premiere it at the festival.

As the publishing landscape transforms, and the writing population expands, the role of small presses is becoming increasingly more significant. Join us as we talk with the founding editors of three independent presses about the kind of work they’re looking for; the relationships they cultivate with their authors during the revision and publication process; their innovative strategies for getting poetry out in the world; and the ways they’re actively working to increase diversity. Panelists include Carissa Halston and Randolph Pfaff of Aforementioned, Liz Kay and Jen Lambert of Spark Wheel Press, and Enzo Silon Surin of Central Square Press.

An homage to Berryman and Bradstreet, poems about Zoloft and in the style of Lyle Lovett, villanelles about American drones and their operators--some of the variety you'll hear from these three award-winning poets and professors in the University of Massachusetts system. Sandra Lim, Maggie Dietz, and Jill McDonough, present poems from recent, new, and forthcoming books, respectively. Lim will read from The Wilderness, which was selected by Louise Gluck for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and published by Norton in 2014; Dietz will read from her long-awaited second collection, That Kind of Happy, just out from The University of Chicago Press; and McDonough will read from Reaper, her groundbreaking book forthcoming next fall from Alice James. Together the three present widely varied approaches to the art of poetry. Q&A to follow reading.

Galaxies and exoplanets, scanning electron microscopes, 4 million queries per minute on Google: in our ever expanding universe, is the human brain still 'wider than the sky' as Emily Dickinson said? What is the role of poet/artist in helping us understand how and where humans fit? Join poet and museum professional Meg Winikates to explore the use of scale in poetry and art in PEM's Sizing It Up exhibition, experiment with physical and mental scale in your writing, and generate a poem idea (or three!) inspired by the artworks on view.

Sunday morning poetry and discussion with Edward Hirsch.

We are pleased to have Marie Howe read and discuss her work at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

The poetic sequence has become a staple of contemporary poetry from its beginnings in the work of Whitman and Dickinson, Yeats and Eliot, and a great many others, over the course of the 20th and into the 21st centuries. Likewise, the book-length poem has found renewed purchase in the culture over the past decade or more. This panel of five prominent poets—Christine Casson, Martha Collins, Steven Cramer, and Daniel Tobin--will discuss the subject and read from their work in these two important and dynamic sub-genres of the art.