An hour-and-a-half’s drive away from Vero, in the vibrant downtown of Delray Beach, one of the nation’s very few festivals devoted entirely to poetry is beginning to whittle its list of participants. The 13th annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival, this year featuring former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic as guest poet, is taking applications for the January event.
The six-day festival takes place at Delray Beach’s Old School Square, the anchor of Delray’s thriving renovated downtown. It runs Jan. 16-21.
Simic, the 2007-08 national poet laureate, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his “The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems.” He also writes prose books, and recently published “Memory Piano.” He is also known for his translations of poetry and writes for the New York Review of Books and the Paris Review.
“There are few poets writing in America today who share his lavish appetite for the bizarre, his inexhaustible repertoire of indelible characters and gestures … Simic is perhaps our most disquieting muse,” wrote the Harvard Review.
Simic will give a public reading the night of the festival’s gala.
There will be nine workshops limited to 12 students, with room for three more to audit the class. In addition, three poets will offer individual conferences. Applications aren’t due until November, but with three poems required it may be time to start musing.
The topics covered are very specific, as are the requirements for class – no haiku for homework here. David Baker, a professor at Denison University and poetry editor of the Kenyon Review, is a multiple prize-winning poet and critic, as well as an interviewer of poets. His workshop involves scrutinizing students’ poetry “line by line” – and the three poems required for admission must include “a confessional or autobiographical poem; an erotic, social, collective or political poem; and a nature poem.”
Another workshop, this one with Tina Chang, the first female poet laureate of Brooklyn, involves writing sensual detail into poetry. According to the synopsis of her class, the first half will cover traditional forms including “the sonnet, ghazal and pantoum” (if I told you a pantoum is a poem with an abab rhyme scheme, would it help?). The second half of Chang’s workshop will look at modernized forms: “the contemporary zuihitsu, erasure and hybrid forms combining poetry and visual art.” Chang teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.
Terrance Hayes, a 2014 MacArthur Fellow, is offering “Reading to Write,” a course focusing on strategies for deriving poems from the experience of reading. Along with looking at how poetry “shadows” not only other poems, but music, film and journalism, workshop participants will engage in “inventive imitations and transformations” in response to reading.
The courses aren’t cheap: $900 for five three-hour workshops, which includes admission to the festival events as well as the gala, and a chance to read at open mic night at Murder on the Beach bookstore.
Auditing a workshop costs $500. But there are many, many readings and talks open to the public at a fraction of those prices.
Already, members of Vero’s vibrant poetry scene have tapped into the event. Longtime Vero rancher, writer and artist Sean Sexton went to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s reading last year. Sexton is probably Vero’s most well-known poet – living poet, that is; Laura Riding Jackson, one of America’s most talked-about poets in the 1930s and ’40s, lived in Vero later in life until her death in 1991. The Laura Riding Jackson Foundation, Vero’s principal literary group, restored Jackson’s simple home and relocated it to the Environmental Learning Center.
There, Sexton leads the annual Poetry Barbecue in late spring, bringing top southeastern U.S. poets to read and talk about their works.
Among the poets to come to Vero is Carol Frost, a Pushcart Prize-winning poet who holds a chair in the English department of Rollins College. Frost was one of the faculty poets in last year’s Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She also staged a public interview with that year’s guest poet, Robert Hass, and introduced him prior to his reading.
For that, Sexton made a special trip to Delray.
“I had a fabulous time,” says Sexton. “It may be the best poetry event in the state. They draw some great ones.”
Vero poet Johanna Jones also made the journey south in 2014 and hopes to go again in 2017. “I’m excited about Charles Simic,” she says. “These are truly poets’ poets. Really top-level.”
Jones remembers other events being equally inspirational, some for only $20 a ticket. “Readings are wonderful,” she recalls. “But the panel discussions and craft talks were equally inspiring. It’s fascinating to hear poets discuss their process and take questions from the audience.”
Jones stayed at the historic Colony Hotel, a 10-minute stroll to the School House and, in the other direction, to the ocean; it’s offering special rates during the festival. “Atlantic Avenue’s vibrant restaurant, live music and street vibe rounded out the experience,” she says. “I had a great time.”
Among the many poets Jones heard the year she went was Campbell McGrath, a Miami-based poet who read at Vero’s barbecue in 2013.
Sexton’s connection to poet Carol Frost was forged at another Florida writing seminar, St. Augustine’s Other Words Literary Seminar, which he regularly attends. He tells stories of wandering the halls of the historic Ponce de Leon Hotel, bumping into prospective poets for Vero’s Poetry Barbecue.
That seminar is part of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition annual conference, founded by Anhinga Press, the premier literary imprint in the state and publisher of Sexton’s own book of poems, “Blood Writing” (2010).
That gathering takes place in early November at Flagler College. This year’s theme is writing humor; among the speakers is poet Lawrence Hedrick, who appeared at Vero’s Poetry Barbecue two years ago.
Its workshops are far more affordable than Delray – only $80.
“In some ways it’s just as wonderful,” Sexton says. “The people are not just completely world famous but they’re all fabulous. And St. Augustine is such a great place to go for any reason.”
Sexton also strongly recommends the Key West Literary Seminar, a four-day event in mid-January, now in its 35th year. The next event in 2017 will include Joyce Carol Oates, Eugene Robinson and Robert Caro – and has already sold out. But the separate Writers Workshop Program still has space; it takes place immediately following the seminar, from Jan. 16-20 – the same dates as Delray’s workshops.
The Key West workshops will include poet Billy Collins, whose class is called “Poetry: Pursuing the Love of Strangers,” and essayist and novelist Kate Moses, who will teach how to write fiction from fact. Though the workshops are as intimate as in Delray, they cost much less: $550 for four three-hour classes. The fee includes other daily workshops for groups up to 100.
Sexton has been three times to the Key West seminar and says the Delray Beach event “is almost as densely populated with great writers.”
Sexton spoke last week from the Denver airport as he headed to Missoula, Montana, to a plein air paint-out with a group of Montana artists who in 2015 came to Vero Beach to paint alongside Vero artists at the McKee Botanical Gardens.
Ever the networker, Sexton is likely to find a few poets among the painters: He was scheduled to give a poetry reading at a ranch Tuesday night.
