By Jennifer Bartman

Peter Meinke, one of the poets who will read March 15, part of the FIU Writers on the Bay series

South Florida poetry fans will have the opportunity to get a taste of the work of two renowned poets on Thursday, March 15, when the Barnes and Noble Writers of the Bay series presents Catherine Bowman and Peter Meinke at the Wolfe University Center on the Biscayne Bay Campus of Florida International in North Miami..

Writers on the Bay is the official reading series of the Creative Writing Program at FIU. The director of the series, poet and professor Denise Duhamel, has invited many distinguished poets and writers to read their work to the public on the Biscayne Bay Campus of the university. Past readers have included April Smith, Li-Young Lee, Robert Pinsky, Jorie Graham and Russell Banks.

“These two poets are going to be an excellent pairing, because they both have really interesting approaches to writing in different poetic forms,” says director of Writers on the Bay Denise Duhamel,of the upcoming Bowman and Meinke reading.

Meinke regularly writes “sonnets or, rather, not-sonnets,” in that he breaks with the traditional sonnet form, and that he also writes in an archaic poetic form called the ballade, not to be confused with the ballad. The ballade is a poem with repeating lines and a very limited rhyme scheme, similar to the villanelle.

“The ballade is a really obscure form that was developed in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and brought to England by Chaucer,” says Duhamel. “Very few poets write in this form—in fact, I had never read one until I read Meinke’s book.”

Duhamel thought that pairing a poet like Bowman with a poet like Meinke would be exciting because Bowman has been known to invent her own poetic forms. In her 2006 book, Notarikon, Bowman included a thousand-line poem broken up into 10 cantos, or sections, each of which has 10 ten-line stanzas in it. To complicate this theme of the power of 10, each line of the poem is 10 syllables long, and each stanza begins with the word “ten,” which is often repeated elsewhere in the each stanza as well.

Because of these poets’ unique approaches to writing in forms, an audience member at the reading can hear archaic poetic constructions like the ballade, familiar forms like the abecedarian and the sonnet, invented forms like Bowman’s “1000 Lines,” as well as excellent free verse poetry. Bowman and Meinke will present such a wide variety of verse, there is sure to be something to fit any listener’s poetic preferences.  There will also be books available for sale, for those audience members who are interested in further exploring these poets’ work.

Meinke’s most recent book, The Contracted World: New & More Selected Poems, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2006. In addition to writing, he also teaches creative writing and literature, and currently holds the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. The Contacted World is his eighth book of poetry; his other collections include Scars, Zinc Fingers, and Liquid Paper. He is the recipient of the Olivet Prize, the Paumanok Award, three Poetry Society of America Awards, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and two NEA Fellowships.

Poet Catherine Bowman

Bowman is the author of three poetry collections, Notarikon, Rock Farm and 1-800-HOT-RIBS. She is the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, and she has won multiple awards for her poetry, including the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and four Yaddo Fellowships. She is also the editor of Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” which is an anthology of poetry that she featured on National Public Radio.

The Creative Writing Department at FIU organized the Writer on the Bay Reading Series as part of an effort to expose students and members of the community to the work of excellent writers from around the country. Professors in the creative writing program take turns recommending poets and writers for the series.  This creates a lot of diversity in the genre, the style and the subject matter of the work that is read at Writers on the Bay events.

Each reading is followed by a question-and-answer session during which members of the audience have an opportunity to interact with the authors. This is valuable interaction for students in the creative writing program, because it gives them a chance to learn about the craft elements that go into the creation of a piece of literature. Duhamel explains that attending these readings is an excellent supplement to any literary education. She said that many times a writer is invited to campus because one of the creative writing professors is teaching his or her book.

Denise Duhamel, director of Writers on the Bay

The opposite is also true, of course, and Duhamel makes it a point to teach the work of writers who have been invited to visit FIU as part of the series.

“I think it’s a really important thing for students to read poems, hear them one way, and then listen to poetry and hear it a totally different way,” she said. “I think I’ve taught every single poet who’s come, whether or not I invited them. It’s a really important tool.”