Thursday, June 03, 2010

Tom Daley's Upcoming Writing Workshops

This message comes from Tom Daley. I wanted to get the jump on getting info on his classes for two newcomers to Stone Soup (hope this doesn't mean I'm going to lose him).


Dear friends:

Here is a list of the workshops I am offering in the summer and fall of 2010. The fall list is incomplete--I will probably be teaching an online workshop on learning from Emily Dickinson at the Online School of Poetry, but that is up in the air. Feel free to pass this on to anyone who might be interested.

Best regards,

Tom Daley

Writing Workshops
led by Tom Daley
Summer 2010

Strategies for Publishing in Journals, Magazines and Online
A workshop for creative writers led by Tom Daley
Monday, June 28
6:30-8:30 pm
at the Atomic Bean Cafe
904 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge
Cost: Ten dollars
limited to fifteen participants
to register, contact the instructor at tom.daley2@verizon.net


Joint workshop for creative writers led by Tom Daley
Seven Wednesdays from 5:30-7 pm
July 7, 14, (skip July 21), July 28 (skip August 4), August 11, 18, 25, and September 1
at the Atomic Bean Cafe
904 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge
Cost--$175
limited to six participants
to register, contact the instructor at tom.daley2@verizon.net


Joint Workshop in Poetry and Memoir Writing

Seven Mondays starting July 12, 2010
Dates: 7/12, 7/19, 7/26, (no class 8/2) 8/9, 8/16, 8/23, 8/30
5:30-7:30 pm
at the instructor’s home in Cambridge
Cost $175. To register and for information contact Tom Daley at tom.daley2@verizon.net

Poetry Writing Workshop
Boston Center for Adult Education
Seven Tuesdays, 5:45 PM-7:45 pm starting July 13, 2010
Ending 8/31/10 (no workshop August 3)
Tuition: $195.00
To register, contact the BCAE at http://www.bcae.org/ or call 617-267-4430


I will also be offering a poetry writing workshop from 12-2 pm on Fridays in July and August at the Brewed Awakening Coffee Shop in Lexington (corner of Marrett Road and Waltham Street) if there is interest. The workshop will last six weeks and cost $150. Dates are July 9, 16, 23, (we'll skip July 30 and August 6), August 13, and 20, 2010. You are free to bring in whatever you are working on, but I will be offering optional exercises in learning from the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Italian poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.


Following the template of a Montale poem, the optional exercises will direct you in writing, should you decide to do them,


1) A poem in which a dream persists through difficult circumstances.

2) A poem about something intended which has not been accomplished.
3) A poem that uses three kinds of weather as a metaphor for emotional states and the transitions between them.
4) A poem that creates “flashes” that illuminate details of a physical setting in which some drama of emotional significance or power is playing out.
5) A poem in which you discuss your or a speaker’s preferences and sensibility. You will include in the description the instance of a falling away from something typically loved or valued that then leads to a transformation.
6) A poem in which metaphors representing some phenomenon from the past are the stair treads on which you ascend or descend from past to future. The phenomenon should endure some transformative or eradicating assault. Then, some aspect of that phenomenon should reemerge or revive.


Here is the template poem for exercise five:



The Lemons

by Eugenio Montale
Translated by Jonathan Galassi


Listen to me, the poets laureate

walk only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
But I like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks,
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.


Better if the hubbub of the birds

dies out, swallowed by the blue:
we can hear more of the whispering
of friendly branches in not-quite-quiet air,
and the sensations of this smell
that can't divorce itself from earth
and rains a restless sweetness on the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of troubled passions calls a truce ;
here we poor, too, receive our share of riches,
which is the fragrance of the lemons.


See, in these silences where things

give over and seem on the verge of betraying
their final secret,
sometimes we feel we're about
to uncover an error in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won't hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally lead
to the heart of a truth.
The eye scans its surroundings,
the mind inquires aligns divides
in the perfume that gets diffused
at the day's most languid.
It's in these silences you see
in every fleeting human
shadow so disturbed Divinity.


But the illusion fails, and time returns us

to noisy cities where the blue
is seen in patches, up between the roofs.
The rain exhausts the earth then;
winter's tedium weighs the houses down,
the light turns miserly -- the soul bitter.
Till one day through a half-shut gate
in a courtyard, there among the trees,
we can see the yellow of the lemons;
and the chill in the heart
melts, and deep in us
the golden horns of sunlight
pelt their songs.


translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi

from Ossi di sepia (Cuttlefish Bones)
in Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems 1920-1954

Fall workshops

If the workshop I am planning in July and August on Fridays from noon-2 pm for poets at Brewed Awakening in Lexington gathers enough interest to run, I'l continue that in the fall.

I lead a 5:30-7:30 pm workshop on Monday nights at my house in Cambridge which starts Monday, September 13 and will last for eight weeks (cost is $200). This is a joint workshop for poetry and memoir writers--although most of the people are working in poetry. I won't know if there will be openings until August 23 at the earliest. Spots in the workshop are available if participants in the workshop that precedes it drop out--I do have some turnover in that workshop, so there's probably a good chance you'll get a spot, but I can't guarantee it. I'll put you on the list for any spots (there are two people on the list already) if you would like. Do let me know if that workshop interests you.

The Boston Center workshop almost always has spots. There will be a new seven-week session starting on September 14, Tuesdays from 5:45-7:45 pm. I also offer a workshop at Lexington Community Education--a new workshop there starts in early October (probably October 6) on Wednesdays from 6:15-7:45 pm. Registration for both those fall workshops usually starts in mid-late summer.


Tom Daley is also available for one-on-one tutorials, manuscript editing, and advice in publication for both poetry and memoir writers. Contact him at tom.daley2@verizon.net for more information.
In addition to his post at the Online School of Poetry (http://onlineschoolofpoetry.org/), Tom Daley serves on the tutorial faculty of Walnut Hill School for the Arts and has lectured on ekphrastic writing at Brown University.


Tom’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Del Sol Review, Rio Grande Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Diagram, 32 Poems, Salamander, Perihelion, and Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology. His manuscript, Shim, was a finalist for the Emily Dickinson First Book Prize and the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes. His poetry was nominated for inclusion in the anthology, The Best New Poets 2007. He is a recipient of the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize.


There is an interview with Tom Daley at http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/TomDaleyinterview.htm, in which he discusses how he conducts his workshops.




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