March 1, 2007
For Immediate Release

The Frost Place, a museum and arts center based at Robert Frost’s historic homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire, will be sponsoring a residency on March 13 and 14 by poet Jack Wiler of Jersey City, New Jersey.

This residency has been organized by teacher Suzanne Moberly, who attended last summer’s Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, and who was impressed by Jack Wiler’s day of presentations there. 

This spring Ms. Moberly is teaching a course as part of her certification/graduate course requirements for Plymouth State University, a course called “Exploring Writing, Exploring Yourself,” Littleton High School’s only writing class. Her goal is to give the students experience with a range of literary genres, including poetry.  During March, the students will  be required to write twenty-one poems generated by a variety of forms and formats. 

“I am excited about having Jack come and do a more intensive workshop,” said Ms. Moberly.  “I think he will jolt them out of their present view of the world, a theme I’m  planning to work on as well.  I also think Jack is a wonderful choice to demonstrate to kids that writing and writers are not boring!”

Jack Wiler was raised in Wenonah, South Jersey, and currently lives in Jersey City, N. J. He has worked as manager of a blood distribution center and a senior’s lunch program and has sold weightlifting supplies. For most of his adult life he has worked in the field of pest control, and presently works at Acme Exterminating in New York City.

He was editor of the magazine Long Shot for many years and has been a visiting poet in the schools for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He performs his work frequently, and his poems have been featured in books including Aloud, the anthology of the Nuyorican Poets Café, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Bum Rush the Page, and The Breath of Parted Lips, Volume II, a collection of poems from The Frost Place. His first book, I Have No Clue, was published in 1996, and his new book is Fun Being Me, published CavanKerry Press in 2006. CavanKerry Press has donated copies of Wiler’s new book for the students at Littleton High School.

In a statement called “Listen Up!” on his publisher’s website (cavankerrypress.com) Wiler has said, “I read my poems in high schools all the time. In some weird way my target audience is a disaffected kid in the back row of the classroom with black leather and torn jeans. . . . because that kid doesn’t know who he or she is yet. That kid is hungry for words and hungry for what they can do to his or her life. Words are powerful. . . . They can change your life. They can console. They can get you a girlfriend or a boyfriend. They can make men walk off to battle. They can bring the boys home. Young people, more than anyone I know, understand this. They believe in the power of words. They believe that the poem they just read is the most important thing in the world.”

“All of us are really the kid in the back of the room. We’re all hungry for words and hungry for hope. Poetry can be a real, true important part of our lives and it seems like it’s been pushed aside. I try to push it up front so it takes its rightful place in the world. A world that needs it now more than ever!”

Mark Doty has written of Wiler’s new book that “Jack Wiler’s poems are rock-bottom genuine, totally direct, and disarmingly moving. . . . his poems are full of great love for the broken world, great love for his fallen fellow human beings, and great rage at the inequity of things. And, somehow, hope, here in this world where ‘gorgeous rains of light/ on a cold August night... / might mean god is watching./ Not well or close,/ but watching.’”

In addition to hosting the residency, the Frost Place sponsors four annual gatherings that draw participants from across the U.S., including the Young Poets Conference (April 27–29, 2007), the Conference on Poetry and Teaching (June 25–29, 2007), the Festival and Conference on Poetry (July 29–August 4, 2007), and the Frost Place Seminar (August 5–10, 2007).

The Town of Franconia and The Frost Place are supported in part by New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The residency at Littleton High School has also been supported by grants from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs: N.H., by CavanKerry Press, and by private donations.

For more information, please contact Frost Place Director Jim Schley at (603) 823–5510 or rfrost@ncia.net. More complete descriptions of Frost Place programs can be viewed here .