Credit: http://www.bristolferry.com ...word-boat

Celicia Woloch and Friends: An Evening of Performance Poetry

"I was born into a working-class family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and my mother claimed I was chanting along to a beer jingle on T.V. before I started walking. I've always been drawn to incantation, to the power and musicality of language, to spoken as well as written language, with how language on the page comes to life when the words are given human breath, the rhythm of the human pulse. If anything can explain why I've made a life's work of poetry, that explains it. I was performing my work for audiences long before my work was published; and, three books later, I'm as drawn as ever to the oral tradition of poetry, language intended to be "read and sung." Poetry's deepest roots lie in that tradition, and the current flowering of performance poetry and poetry slams and hip-hop and rap seem to me to be infusing "literary" poetry with renewed passion and vitality. That this flowering is a world-wide phenomenon gives me hope for the future of poetry. For this evening, I'll be joined by some of the most dynamic performance poets from the U.S. and from France, who'll share their work and talk about moving between the page and the stage, bringing the written word to life."


Host: Cecilia Woloch is the author of Sacrifice, a BookSense 76 selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; and Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for 2004. Her chapbook manuscript, Narcissus, was recently chosen winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Competition and will be published in 2007. The founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and also of the Paris Poetry Workshop, Ms. Woloch is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low -residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University. She lives in Los Angeles and spends part of each year traveling and teaching in Europe.