The three-day event will include readings from the authors’ works and lectures from the authors.
Poetry has a reputation of being complicated — to the point where many people avoid reading it altogether. This is something poet Kevin Prufer wants to change.
“I was taught that poets write poems in a kind of a code, and it was the job of the reader to break the code and understand the poem,” Prufer, an award-winning American poet and writer, said. “But that suggests, years later in retrospect, that the writer is writing to avoid communication.”
Prufer will be one of five writers featured in the Spring Literary Festival, an event sponsored by the Creative Writing program in the English Department. Writers will host two events each — one in which they read a selection from one of their works, and another that takes the form of a lecture over a certain topic. The festival will take place Wednesday through Friday, with readings and lectures held in Baker Theater, Baker Ballroom and Alden Library’s fourth floor.
Prufer’s lecture will cover the complexity of poems, and how it affects readers and poets. His poetry includes recurring themes of mortality and politics, with commentary on modern American imperialism and national borders, for example.
In addition to Prufer, the festival will feature poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, fiction writer Kelly Link, essayist Phillip Lopate and poet and fiction author Stuart Dybek.
“For a couple of days, we are kind of at the center of the literary conversation,” David Wanczyk, the director for Special Programs in the English Department said. “It’s not that anyone is paying attention necessarily to Athens, but we would say this is the best group of writers anywhere in the country right now for these three days.”
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="f6d11c8c-fa98-11e5-9ba7-e382dafc9fe9"}}
Prufer said he enjoys the ability to entertain a question through poetry without having to come to a conclusion or answer. In addition, he said a common perception he sees is that poetry is only about “feelings,” when it can include themes such as philosophy as well.
“There’s a way that the poetic line works,” he said. “With its blank space, its frequent pauses where lines end and lines begin, that’s really good at expressing the sort of silence before a thought comes to you, or the moment where a feeling intrudes on a thought. Those are things that poems do very well, and they’re all part of thinking as well as feeling.”
Lopate is an author that has contributed heavily to the discussion of creative nonfiction, a style of writing that is factually correct but includes some creative liberty taken by the author.
“It is one of those genres, if you can call it a genre, that’s hard to box in and that’s probably part of the appeal,” Tom Tiberio, the English Department’s Special Programs assistant and a graduate student studying creative nonfiction, said.
Tiberio used the example of famous writer Hunter S. Thompson who, “stretched the limits” in areas of writing like journalism, by inserting himself into the story instead of remaining an objective outsider.
Even those who were initially unsure about poetry have enjoyed the Literary Festival in the past, Wanczyk said.
“I’ve seen a lot of people come into these events wary, they’ve been required to come or they’re not sure what they’re going to see,” he said. “But usually they leave thrilled — there’s been some element that’s been extremely funny or surprising, or the (writers) we’ve brought in have been shockingly lively.”
@seanthomaswolfe
