Poetry Roundtable – A Study of Women Poets

While there are very few prominent English language women poets prior to the 20th century, women of extraordinary talent flashed onto, some would say began to dominate, the poetic landscape just after mid-century, when their more domestic, more intimately personal, more openly, at times stridently angry, emotional, and candidly sexual world found poetic legitimacy and an audience hungrier for it than perhaps anyone knew.

A few days prior to each session, the facilitator will provide a reading assignment. Poets will be selected from this list: Kim Addonizio, Lucille Clifton, Louise Gluck, Jane Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, Audre Lord, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

This group will meet on Thursdays, January 25, February 1, 8, 15, 22, 29.

GUEST FACILITATOR:
Bill Freedman was born in Newark, NJ, took a PhD in English Literature at the University of Chicago in 1964 and taught in the City University of New York system before moving to Israel in 1969. He taught English literature at the University of Haifa until his retirement in 2004 and, since then, he has taught part-time at the Sakhnin College of Teacher Education in the Arab town of Sakhnin. Bill received an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University in 1974 and was a practicing psychotherapist until his retirement in 2010. Bill has published books and a number of essays in literary criticism and theory, an oral history of baseball fans, and four books of poetry.