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Tag Archives: poet laureate

Poet El Jones on Violence Against Women

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by thepoetsbillow in Blog

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ban, chris brown, Culture, education, El Jones, entertainment, halifax, jian ghomeshi, music, nova scotia, petition, poem, Poet, poet laureate, Poetry, poets, protest, Society, violence against women, writers, Writing

El Jones, poet laureate of Halifax and Women’s Studies professor at Acadia University, joins Jian to express a more nuanced take on the controversy that has erupted around a planned Chris Brown concert in the Halifax area.

The Dartmouth, N.S. show is set to feature controversial R&B singer Chris Brown, who pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend, pop star Rihanna, in 2009.

Check out the radio interview on the show Q with Jian Ghomenshi

Natasha Trethewey on Her Revision Process

08 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by thepoetsbillow in Blog

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Article, elegy, father's elegy, final draft, hoyt, Laureate, literature, natasha trethewey, poem, Poet, poet laureate, Poetry, revision, revision process, Trethewey, Writing

This is a really insightful article on revision. Here’s an excerpt:

How Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey Wrote Her Father’s ‘Elegy’

By Alex Hoyt

Now, the reader seeing the final draft doesn’t know that I have my own secret journal in which I feel “silenced” by my father. The work of the poem is following certain paths and not others. I have to decide whether or not I’m going to reveal to an audience this side of my relationship with my father. When I write notes in my journal, I’m just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

Writing [by hand] frees up a mode of thinking that allows me to consider more things without censorship, the way I would censor if I were typing. If I start writing on a computer, I feel that it’s official. When I’m actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That’s the workhorse part. At that point, I’m being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.

 

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