Residency #134
MAY 18 – JUNE 7
Application deadline: February 6, 2009
BRENDA HILLMAN, poetry
 Brenda Hillman has published seven collections of poetry: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997), Cascadia (2001), and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), all from Wesleyan University Press, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003).
Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers' Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is married to poet Robert Hass.
Hillman has been increasingly interested in the innovative and experimental lyric traditions, particularly in how the Romantic concepts of nature and spirit have manifested in contemporary poetry. In her essay entitled "Split, Spark, and Space," Hillman writes about the emergence of different kinds of lyric impulses in her writing: "The sense of a single 'voice' in poetry grew to include polyphonies, oddly collective dictations, and the process of writing itself. This happened in part because of a rediscovered interest in esoteric western tradition and in part because I came to a community of women who were writing in exploratory forms. …A poetic method which had heretofore been based on waiting for insight suddenly had to accommodate process, and indeterminate physics, a philosophy of detached looking."
Residency Statement
For the first two weeks of the residency, we will be writing every day, producing new drafts of poetry, bringing new materials in to the two hour workshop to discuss them; emphasis will be similar to that of Squaw Valley Community and Napa Valley workshops: generating materials and poems that constitute a breakthrough in the writing. We will be drafting new poetry for the weekly workshops, and the critiques will be general and affirmative, emphasizing craft elements that pertain to the whole group in the form of discussion. During the last week we will have conferences on the work you have done in the first two weeks.
I am interested in the range of poetry in our present time, so I’m hoping for participants who will be open to experimental writing as well as to personal and hybrid styles and forms. It’s to be hoped that our sessions will be full of eclectic ventures and inspiring for the work that will follow.
Application Requirements
Applicants should submit 5 poems or up to 10 pages of work, a brief resume or CV and a short paragraph statement of poetics.
* For more information on Brenda Hillman please visit http://www.blueflowerarts.com/bhillman.html |
