Part memoir, part essay, and partly a guide to maximizing your capacity for artistic expression, The Poetry of Everyday Life taps into the artistic side of what we often take for granted: the stories we tell, the people we love, the sports and games we play, the metaphors used by scientists, even our sex lives. Zeitlin explores how poems serve us in daily life, describing his family’s annual “poetry night,” as well as the way poems are used in crisis situations: to serve people with AIDS, and as a form of healing and remembrance after September 11. The book brings together the folklorist and the poet’s perspectives: it combines a folkloric approach that strives to document the creative expressions of a culture, with a creative-writing approach, which addresses our personal creativity. “This convergence of poetry and folklore,” he suggests, “gives birth to something new: a new way of seeing ourselves, and a new way of being in the world.” Written with humor and insight, the book introduces readers to the many eccentric and visionary characters Zeitlin has met in his career as a folklorist. Covering topics from ping pong to cave paintings, The Poetry of Everyday Life seeks to expand your consciousness of the beauty in your own world—and to inspire you to draw on words and other forms of creative expression to acknowledge and share this heightened awareness. To live a creative life is the best way to engage with the beauty of the everyday.
Friday 16 October 2015 2-4pm Centennial C AFS. Long Beach, CA
Panel: “Performances and After-words: Poets and Storytellers on Research,
the Creative Process, and Beyond”
Sponsored by
Folklore & Creative Writing Section
Storytelling Section
WE WILL NOT BE FOLLOWING THE TIME SCHEDULE IN THE AFS PROGRAM BOOK
Panelists, in order of performance:
Susan Tichy, Professor, MFA Program: Poetry, George Mason University.
“20 Years of Trafficke: A Poet’s Expedition through History, Legend, Race, & Genre”
Margaret “Peggy” Yocom, Folklore Studies Program/Engl Dept, Emerita, George Mason Univ
“Allerleirauh Speaks: Erasure Poetry Re-envisions the Brothers Grimm”
Milbre Burch, Department of Communication, and the International Teaching Assistant Program of the Office of Graduate Studies, Univ of Missouri
“Changing Skins, Changing Minds.”
Joseph Sobol, Professor, Dept of Comm & Performance (Storytelling Program), ETSU
“Jack and the Least Girl”: Contemporary Transformations of a Traditional Appalachian Story-Cycle.”
Panel Time Schedule:
Performances (1 hour and a bit more) 15 minute performances by each of 4 panelists:
2:05. Susan reads from Trafficke (poems)
2:20. Peggy reads from “ALL KINDS OF FUR” (poems)
2:35. Milbre performs a section of “Changing Skins: Tales about Gender, Identity and Humanity”
2:50. Joseph performs a section of the story “Jack and the Least Girl”
Discussion (just under an hour)
“There never was a story without a poem. It is in the nature of storytelling that the narrative is constructed around a poetic interior” -- Harold Scheub, The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry & Narrative, p. 23.