Marcia Karp; A Poet in the House Workshop.

An exclusive event for NEPC members: “An Order the Leaves Allow”

“You can write Click on this link to register for this event”

Marcia Karp taught literary and editorial matters at Boston University. She has poems and translations in The Times Literary Supplement; Harvard Review; Agenda; Literary Imagination; The Guardian; Ploughshares; Partisan Review; Penguin Books’ Catullus in English and Petrarch in English; Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 (Waywiser); and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (Norton) and in her collection, If by Song (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021).

Join on Zoom, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm,for this discussion of the variety of ways volumes of poems are ordered. Since a book itself is a participant in, and a witness to, the order within it, we will begin by thinking about how the material world of poems – the pages they are on and the variety of books in which they have been collected – might effect and affect their ordering.

Most of us hope that our own ordering will be discovered by attentive readers whose understanding of what we have done would then be deepened. This Poet in the House session will consider particular arrangements of poems, including those you might be working on, as well as general matters. Please come. Enthusiastic disorder is welcome.

Poet in the House with Marcia Karp

An Order the Leaves Allow 

This Poet in the House gathering will be a place to talk about a variety of ways volumes of poems, including your own, might be ordered. Since a book itself is a participant in, and a witness to, the order within it, we will begin by thinking about how the material world of poems – the pages they are on and the variety of books in which they have been collected – might effect and affect their ordering.

Papyrus scrolls allowed certain orders that might have some bearing on our own digital scrolls. Books with a spine, those things beloved of centuries of readers and writers, make other things possible.

One way to look at how a volume might be ordered, is to start with pieces of papyrus or paper and work backwards. The poem we call “My Cat Jeoffry” was found somewhere in “sixteen folio pages closely written on both sides in the handwriting of Christopher Smart.” If possible, you will be sent pages that duplicate some of those and together we will try to make sense, ordered sense, of what was once considered madness, and then seen as greatness.

Some of us hope that our ordering will be discovered by attentive readers whose understanding of what we have done would then be deepened. George Herbert and Sylvia Path took great with arrangements, only to have those undone by editors. In any case, readers have their own ways of going through what they read. Anne Ferry wrote “anthologies have the advantage in containing discontinuous, short pieces suited to the desultory mode of reading that has come to be called dipping.” True, too, of volumes of a single author’s poems. What’s a poet to do?

This Poet in the House session will consider particular arrangements of poems, including those you might be working on, as well as general concerns. Please come. Enthusiastic disorder is welcome.