Woodland
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Earning Our Daily Bread:
Poets and Their Day Jobs |
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Panel:
Saturday, December 11, 2pm
Milwaukee Public Library, Central, Krug Rare Books Room
Earning Our Daily Bread: Poets and Their Day Jobs curated by Milwaukee Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas with panelists Sue Blaustein, Nina Corwin, William Fuller, Frank Lima and moderator Karl Gartung.
We often hear about accomplished poets who teach for a living as professors in Creative Writing programs or who work in the publishing industry, yet many, as did Wallace Stevens (insurance man/poet) and William Carlos Williams (doctor/poet), make their "daily bread" in other areas of employment, while still leading active writing lives—publishing books, editing anthologies, winning (and judging) writing contests, giving public readings, and the like.
Please join us for a panel discussion with Frank Lima (New York poet/master chef), Nina Corwin (poet/psychotherapist), William Fuller (poet/trust officer), Sue Blaustein (poet/food safety inspector/union officer), and moderator Karl Gartung (poet/truck driver/Woodland Pattern co-founder), who will discuss the relationship between a poet's day job and his/her poetry, writing career, and writing processes.
How might these elements affect one another? How does the choice not to teach in academia affect one's writing life and one's opportunities to publish and present his/her work? How might these poets' work lives enrich their poetry or detract from their inspiration? Writing too is labor, so the poets will also share with us a few of its finest fruits.
Frank Lima was born in New York City in Spanish Harlem, 1939. His parents were Mexican and Puerto Rican. He received a Master's from Columbia University in 1975. During the '60's and '70's he published three books of poetry: Inventory, (Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1964), Underground with the Oriole (E. P. Dutton, 1971), and Angel (W. W. Norton, 1976). In the late '70's Lima dropped out of the poetry world to devote his time to his family and pursue a career in the culinary arts. Trained in his youth in classical French cooking, he worked at the White House during the Kennedy Administration with chef Renee Verdon as his comee in the kitchen. He later became a teacher at the New York Restaurant School. His Inventory: New and Selected Poems, edited by David Shapiro appeared from Hard Press in 1997. Frank says he will always remain an apprentice to Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch & William Shakespeare. His next book of poems is scheduled to be published this winter by John Yau: The Beatitudes. He currently lives by the ocean in Lido Beach, NY and writes everyday, no matter what.
Sue Blaustein is a food safety inspector for the Milwaukee Health Department. She has also served as an officer, newsletter editor and volunteer organizer for her union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Sue has been writing poetry for over twenty years. She has participated in numerous workshops at Woodland Pattern Book Center, and has worked with Debra Vest, a private writing coach, since 1998. Her work has appeared in an anthology, In My Neighborhood - Celebrating Wisconsin Cities, and in the journals Wisconsin Academy Review, New Delta Review, Isotope - A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Wisconsin People and Ideas and online in Blue Fifth Review. Another poem will appear this year in Verse Wisconsin.
Nina Corwin is the author of Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints and The Uncertainty of Maps (upcoming 2011). Nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including ACM, Forklift, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review/nor, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review and Verse. Corwin is an Advisory Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and co-edited the anthology Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art By Women. She has performed her work across the country, regularly collaborating with musicians, dancers and other poets. Corwin lives in Chicago, where she is a practicing psychotherapist known for her work on behalf of victims of violence.
William Fuller's recent books include Sadly (Flood Editions, 2003), Watchword (Flood Editions, 2006) and Three Replies (Barque Press, 2008). Two books are forthcoming in 2011: Hallucination (Flood Editions) and Quorum (Seagull Books). A graduate of Lawrence University and the University of Virginia, where he received his doctorate in Renaissance literature, Fuller has worked in the Trust Department of Chicago's Northern Trust Company for twenty-seven years; he is currently Chief Fiduciary Officer.
Karl Gartung (moderator) is a founder of Woodland Pattern Book Center. For most of Woodland Pattern's thirty years he acted as its artistic director. He drives a truck for UPS Cartage Services where he is also a Teamster Union steward. Gartung was born in Liberal, Kansas (a place and a contradiction). He is the author of Now That Memory Has Become So Important (MWPH, 2008). A collaboration with Elizabeth Robinson, Speak, was privately published in 2009. An extended collaboration with Faith Barrett, In Words War, is forthcoming in the on-line magazine, Jacket.
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