Devil's Kitchen Schedule

Thursday, Oct. 25

• 8-9 p.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Readings by Mary Jo Firth Gillett and Wendy Rawlings

Gillett's collection of poems, "Soluble Fish," published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2007, won the 2006 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Gillett teaches poetry workshops for Springfed Arts-Metro Detroit Writers and co-edited the anthology, "Mona Poetica." Her poetry appears in publications such as the Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Green Mountain Review and in the anthology "New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poets."

Rawlings won the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction with her collection, "Come Back Irish" and won the 2007 Michigan Literary Award for her novel, "The Agnostics." Her essays and stories also appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Agni, Tin House, Fourth Genre and Cincinnati Review. She is part of the graduate faculty in creative writing at the University of Alabama.

• 9-10 p.m. – Festival Reception, J.W. Corker Lounge in the SIUC Student Center

Friday, Oct. 26

• 10-10:50 a.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Poetry Panel featuring Betty Adcock, Mary Jo Firth Gillett, Patricia Spears Jones, James Kimbrell and Simone Muench

Adcock teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2002-2003, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at North Carolina State University in 2003. Her poetry books include the award-winning "Intervale: New and Selected Poems," and "Walking Out," "Nettles," "Beholdings," and "The Difficult Wheel."

Jones has two poetry collections, including "Femme du Monde," which was named one of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2006 by www.About.com's Poetry Forum. She is part of the downtown New York City poetry and theater scenes, and works with the experimental Mabou Mines theater collective, for which she wrote "Song for New York." She writes a column for Calabar Magazine and teaches workshops.

Kimbrell's poetry collection, "My Psychic," won the 2007 Devil's Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry. His other works include the collection, "The Gatehouse Heaven," co-translation of a collection of modern Korean poetry and poems appearing in "The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets," "American Poetry: The Next Generation" and "Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century." He is an associate professor of creative writing at Florida State University.

Muench won awards for her first two books of poems. "The Air Lost in Breathing," her first book, won the Marianne Moore Prize. Her second, "Lampblack and Ash," won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry and was an editor's choice for the "New York Times Book Reivew." She has two chapbooks and her poems appear in such publications as Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, Luna and Swink as well as the anthology "The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for a New Century." She directs the writing program at Lewis University, teaching both creative writing and film studies. She is on the advisory board for Switchback Books and is an editor for Sharkforum.

• 11-11:50 a.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Fiction Panel featuring Kerry Neville Bakken, Dale Ray Phillips and Wendy Rawlings

Bakken's collection of short stories, "Necessary Lies," is the 2007 Devil's Kitchen Reading Award in Prose winner. An assistant professor of English at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, she has stories in Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly and Arts and Letters.

Phillips holds the Watkins Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Murray State University. His stories appear in his collection, "My People's Waltz," and in publications including The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories From the South: The Year's Best.

• 2-3 p.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Readings by Simone Muench and Betty Adcock

• 3:15-4:30 p.m. – Old Main Lounge, Student Center – Festival readers' reception and book signing

• 5-6 p.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Readings by James Kimbrell and Kerry Neville Bakken

Saturday, Oct. 27

• 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Readings from the new anthology "Surreal South." Readings include several of the authors and the editors, Laura Benedict and Pinckney Benedict.

• 2-3 p.m. – Student Center Auditorium – Readings by Dale Ray Phillips and Patricia Spears Jones

Submissions

I want to encourage all of you to submit to the undergraduate literary magazine Grassroots. We need submissions. The deadline is October 31st. You can submit in poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual arts. I am going to attach the link at the bottom of this post to Grassroots on Facebook. If you get on there then you will be able to view the submission guidelines. All voting of works to be published is anonymous. Please submit. If you don't have a facebook account you will need to make one in order to view this page.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=535181558
You can submit works to: grassrootsmag@gmail.com please submit them as a Microsoft Word attachment. If you have any questions about submitting send them an e-mail and they will let you know how to get it to them.
Make sure you attach the following on a separate page
Name
Title of Work
Email
Phone Number
You may submit as many pieces as you would like and the prose pieces must be 7,000 words or less.
Again, please submit. It's worth a shot!

hyphen

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/?refid=6

This poet really likes to use hyphens. I still don't understand using hyphens. To me it draws out the space and makes it sound weird. What is you take on it?

Yeah...

Okay, I'm going to preface this by letting you know I'm a star wars fan, so this is hilarious to me.

http://mesajarjar.blogspot.com/

It doesn't follow the movie's storyline at all, but its a really funny look at the galaxy from Jar Jar's eyes. Seems to be a great example of dialect and being able to write from a characters point of view. Anyway, Jar-jar haters and lovers alike should enjoy this. :D

Cosmology

After reading the poem Cosmology I would have to a agree with a general statement that Ms. Bell made in class about modern poetry. The poem seems to be well written which makes me like it, but like so many modern poems I'm not sure I grasped the whole meaning. I feel like the music and word choice were good, the form was interesting, but the story seems to lack clarity. However this could work for or against the poem. I like the phrase drowsy rain, a use of personification. I also like the simile used in "like marionettes.." This provides a good imagery. The form is interesting, in that the author chooses to capitalize the first word of the line only occassionally, this keeps it from being predictable. Another element that is particularlly nice is the repitition of words like beneath, and under throughout the poem it makes the reader feel like we keep getting deeper and deeper into the poets psyche. The words clay, shale , slate sound nice together with the repitition of the long a sound. Also the repeating reference to clouds, ghosts, and hovering is nice for unity.
-Nathan

Poem

I meant to post this Tuesday but I didn't get a chance.

Assignment: Read Cosmology and comment about the elements of craft within the poem. And I do not want any comments about MEANING.

Decipher

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16430

Here is a poem by Dylan Thomas that I thought was very interesting. I'm putting my comment in a cynical way. I have never been really big into poetry because a lot of the time I'm not really sure what they're talking about. I start to lose myself in the words and before I notice I'm so far into confusion.

My question is this, What is the best way to go around deciphering the more obscure poems?

Hopefully some other students in the class were secretly thinking this theirself and it could help not only me.