The Frost Place Advanced Seminar

How do the poems of the past influence, guide, and challenge contemporary writers?

How can you draw lessons from our poetic predecessors to deepen and strengthen your own poetry?

Spend five days with a select community of poets exploring your artistic work in the context of our enormous and complex literary tradition. Discover how that tradition can provide both models and provocations to widen your thinking about your own efforts.

Learn from a distinguished and accomplished faculty how poets choose, absorb, and respond to poetic influences.

Enjoy delicious group meals and spirited conversation surrounded by views of the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire.

Take part in readings in The Henry Holt Barn at The Frost Place, where Robert Frost lived full-time between 1915 and 1920 then spent summers through 1938.

The Seminar schedule features a daily morning talk and discussion exploring aspects of craft and technique, with a close look at the work of our poetic forebears; an afternoon workshop of participants’ poems; and an evening reading, some of these readings by faculty poets and others featuring participants.

This is a unique opportunity for dedicated poets to delve intensely into the poetic process. Seminar participants will have their poems-in-progress given generous and focused attention and will be invited to think in new ways about what can be accomplished in revision.

Enrollment is strictly limited to 16 participants. Priority will be given to participants in previous Frost Place programs, including the Conference on Poetry and Teaching, the Festival and Conference on Poetry, or The Frost Place Advanced Seminar, with a limited number of spaces available for qualified first-time Frost Place visitors.

Enthusiastic responses from previous Frost Place Advanced Seminar participants:

"A whole week of honest and stimulating conversation about poetry. . . . Both faculty and participants were unfailingly generous, welcoming, friendly. Critique sessions were highly engaging, insightful, and intelligent."

"The lectures were all extremely interesting, informative and smart."

"I most liked having three so different voices leading the workshop, so there was a three-dimensional feel to the discussion."

"A very affirming experience, which calls me back to the work I have to do once I'm home."

FULLY SUBSCRIBED

2010 Seminar Faculty

Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Director of The Frost Place Advanced Seminar, is the author of Curious Conduct (BOA Editions, 2004) and Placebo Effects (Norton, 1997), selected by William Matthews as a winner in the National Poetry Series. Her new collection Burning of the Three Fires will be out from BOA Editions in 2010. With Claudia Carlson, she co-edited the anthology The Poets’ Grimm: Twentieth Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line, 2003), and for seven years she was co-editor of the literary magazine American Letters & Commentary. Her poems have been published in magazines such as Denver Quarterly, The Nation, Harper’s, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and World Literature Today, and in several anthologies including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, When She Named Fire, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Her poem “Afraid So” was made by Jay Rosenblatt into a short film that has been shown at numerous festivals, where it has garnered several awards. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and has taught at The Frost Place and Rutgers University. She currently teaches at The Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y and in the Stonecoast MFA program. Her website is found at www.jeannemariebeaumont.com

Gray Jacobik, earned her Ph.D. in American and British Literature from Brandeis University. She holds the rank of University Professor Emeritus, having taught literature, with distinction, at Eastern Connecticut State University. A widely-published poet, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Jacobik’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ontario Review, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares and many other print and on-line journals. She is the winner of The Yeats Prize, The Emily Dickinson Prize, and The Third Coast Poetry Prize. Her third book, The Double Task, received The Juniper Prize and was nominated for The James Laughlin Award and The Poet’s Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering, a forth collection, was selected by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises received the AWP Poetry Series Award. In 2002, she served as the Robert Frost Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place. From 2003 until 2009, Gray taught on the graduate faculty of the Stonecoast MFA Program. Her sixth book, Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse, is forthcoming from CavanKerry. She lives with her husband, Bruce Gregory, in Deep River, Connecticut.

Fred Marchant's most recent book of poetry, The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009) was named by Barnes and Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009. He is also the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry, and Full Moon Boat (Graywolf Press, 2000). A new and selected volume,House on Water, House in Air, was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland, in 2002. Fred Marchant is also the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard, poetry by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa, published in 2006 in Ha Noi, Viet Nam. He is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (Graywolf Press, 2008), a selection that focuses on the work done while he was a conscientious objector during World War II. He is Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program, and Director of The Poetry Center at Suffolk University in Boston. A graduate of Brown University, he earned a PhD from The University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He is a longtime teaching affiliate of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He has taught workshops at sites across the country, including The Frost Place, and was the 2009 co-winner (with Afaa Michael Weaver) of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets whose “work is an inspiration to other poets.”

Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of twelve books, most recently the paperback edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems, and a work of fiction entitled The Poetry Life: Ten Stories. He is a former poet laureate of Maine who teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program and the Fairfield University MFA Program and works widely in schools. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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P.O. Box 74 , Ridge Road, Franconia, NH 03580

Telephone: (603) 823–5510

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