Poet Perry Nicholas and singer/songwriter Maria Sebastian are a couple whose partnership illustrates the prolific relationship between words and music. Join us for an intimate house concert/reading, where they'll each perform sets, alone and together, inspired by the other. While they cast their lyrical spell we’ll enjoy a communal indoor/outdoor picnic ~ please bring along your favorite dish to share! Afterward, those who would like to linger will gather by the firepit and share poems, songs, and stories of our own.

"We shall not wilt. Let a thousand flowers bloom." — Abbie Hoffman, Workshop in Nonviolence, May 1967

The expression "flower power" was coined by the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg as a way to re-visualize war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles. Like seeds of flowers, war contains within it all life compressed. Because human beings are fragile in the face of it, time seems to stop. The immediate moment can seem like a year. All that we love becomes more precious even as we are numbed by violent circumstances.

Though war has not gone away despite exhortations of the peaceful, when the lens is brought close to the particulars of a soldier, veteran, or involved civilian’s life, we may see truth and beauty in small daily things, little gems that reflect the whole, a fly’s eye of brilliant perception.

A remarkable mix of publishers, exhibitors, workshops and authors—including two special guests with books of regional significance—are coming together for the Second Annual Catskill Interpretive Center Book Fair at the Center on Route 28 in Mt. Tremper on Saturday, June 24, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Poetry Barn authors will be reading from their works from 11:30-1:00 in Venue B at the fair. Earlier, at 10 a.m. Will Nixon will be offering a writer's workshop as one of the opening programs. Two venues of speakers and presenters will be maintained throughout the day, along with a children's tent. Bring your picnic lunch and enjoy the day!

Giving voice to written work can add layers of meaning while specifying our intent and charging the inky symbols on the page with emotional and intellectual substance.  Recitation is an art and in this five-hour workshop participants will work with award-winning performance poet, storyteller, and educator David Gonzalez to hone the skills needed to enliven the written page for the performance stage. 

Play and experiment with art techniques; process thoughts and feelings; document your life! Art journals combine images and words to express a thought, feeling, or idea, manifesting into your own personal journey of creative expressionism. An Earth Day event.

To construct the Ashokan Reservoir, which the Poetry Barn borders, four hamlets were demolished and eight moved, some 2,000 people were forced out to flood the valley, and some 2,000 graves disinterred. Residents thus experienced the loss of their homes as well as their communities and the cornerstones of their society: churches, schools, shops, and railroad stations. We'll learn more about its history, reading and writing poems of place, landscape, the water crisis, ruins, and ghosts. 

In this workshop, we'll transform the lushness of the Hudson River School paintings into the "black ink" of haiku. We'll close-read well-known haiku masters and feast our eyes on some of the great Hudson River School paintings. After writing our haiku, we'll literally "paint them in black ink" on a large sheet of paper to take home.

We’ll provide the tools: punch, awl, needles, twine, bone folders, paper. You provide the creativity. You’ll learn two simple methods of creating and binding a book, hands-on, which you can then take home with you. The techniques we will use are the Japanese four-hole stab bookbinding technique and pamphlet-stitching.
 

From planting to harvest, cooking to eating, food has inspired poets as one of life's most sensual pleasures, and because poetry about food is often just as much about something else: body image, love, yearning, addiction. The Catskills' edible bounty is a feast for the senses. We’ll pair exemplary food poems with delectable local fare, observing the unique characteristics of each food type, and drawing upon all of our senses to write the food poem that could only issue from your throat.

At this event, we’ll pay homage to the Barn's cultural heritage by reading and writing poems about wings, flight, and transformation. Participates will be provided with templates to construct paper airplanes from their poems to keep as objets d’art or to launch on a flight to be found someday by someone who needs to read it at that very moment in time.