Come Create Workshop: Exploring Traditional Japanese Poetry & Art

Description

Come Create! Workshops are offered by Portsmouth Poet Laureate Tammi Truax. Learn traditional Japanese poetry and art forms from local writers and artists. This program is co-sponsored by the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program, as part of a project of building a bridge to Japan. At the first workshop, poets Tammi Truax and Mark DeCarteret will lead participants in an exploration of the traditional Japanese poetry forms of haiku, senryu, renga and haibun, while painter Grace Gordon will lead experimentation with traditional cherry blossom painting! Tammi J. Truax is the 12th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth. Her poet laureate project is “Poetry as a Bridge.” She is a teacher, editor and prize-winning author and poet. In 2008, with New Hampshire poet Kyle Potvin, Tammi founded the non-profit The Prickly Pear Poetry Project to share the healing power of poetry for people whose lives have been impacted by cancer. She is the editor of The Poet’s Tale and Lady Wentworth by Henry W. Longfellow, and the author of Broken Buckets and For to See the Elephant. She works daily for the Portsmouth School librarian, and is on-call with the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail as a guide and the NH Humanities Council as a facilitator of the Connections literacy program. To learn more about Tammi, visit www.tammitruax.com. Mark DeCarteret was Portsmouth’s 7th poet laureate, has had work in such reviews as AGNI, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Conduit, Cream City Review, failbetter, Hotel Amerika, Phoebe, Poetry East, Salamander, Sonora Review, and Third Coast, as well as the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Places of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press), Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press) and Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited. His chapbook “Flap” was published by Finishing Line Press in spring 2011. Grace Gordon is a visual artist from Eliot, ME. A UNH graduate with a degree in art history, she is a largely self-taught painter whose favored medium is oil paint and watercolor. Her work can be seen on Instagram @by.gracegordon. The Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program is dedicated to building community through poetry by appointing and supporting an outstanding local poet as Poet Laureate for the city, sponsoring events that feature area poets and authors from outside the New Hampshire Seacoast, and encouraging a love of poetry among people of all ages. Established in 1997 by local arts organizers and writers, the program brings people together to celebrate the written word and the talents of local and visiting artists.