- This event has passed.
You Call THAT a Poem?
October 20, 2021 @ 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm EDT
Just because the author tells you it’s a poem, does that really make it a poem? Could you tell the difference if it wasn’t? Is an all-encompassing definition of the term “Poem” even possible?
Panelists Lynn Alexander (founder of Lehigh Valley Poetry,) Karen Lillis (owner/ operator of Karen’s Book Row,) Frank May (owner/ curator of M Galleries) and Chris Phillips (English professor at Lafayette College) will tackle the elusive subject of what technical qualifications make a piece of writing count as a poem. Subjects will include prose poetry, found poetry and poetry as performance pieces.
A live, online presentation, presented on our festival website front page.
Link to join Zoom Webinar, as an attendee who can comment by chat message (but not as an on-screen panelist):
Meet the Panelists:
E. Lynn Alexander’s roots are in the independent press, zine and festival worlds, editing and producing poetry and fiction content. She organizes local poetry events and open mics and is on year two of working on the Easton Book Festival.
Karen Lillis is a bookseller and the author of four experimental novellas, most recently “Watch The Doors as They Close,” (Spuyten Duyvil.) She writes in a variety of forms, including poetry, poetic prose and memoir. She received a 2014 Acker Award for Avant Garde Excellence in Fiction, and currently makes her home in Pittsburgh, PA. Find her work at Karen’s Book Row. https://bookshop.org/shop/
Frank May is the owner and curator of M Galleries, M Galleries PNA, M Galleries Fellowship, and M Galleries Papillon (mgalleries.org) in Washington, NJ, Basking Ridge, NJ, and Metuchen, NJ. He has apprenticed under the ceramic artist Peter Callas (petercallas.com). Frank has a degree from Mason Gross School of the Arts – Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ (masongross.rutgers.edu). He is also on the faculty of the duCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ (ducret.edu) and The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, NJ (ccabedminster.org)
Chris Phillips is professor and department head of English at Lafayette College, where he teaches in American literature, nature writing, spiritual writing, and book history (etc., etc.). His research on the history of poetry and the history of reading has taken him from the vistas of epic to the vicissitudes of hymnody. It’s also his birthday today.