After a six-year hiatus, PoemWorks once again is offering a weekend retreat poetry workshop at 26 Split Rock Cove, entitled “Nature in Translation.”  Eric Hyett and Alexis Ivy will be our leaders in a weekend of generative and experimental writing using an exploration of nature as the theme.

The weekend begins late Friday afternoon when we’ll arrive and get settled at the Blue Lupine, a charming former B&B located just minutes from 26 Split Rock Cove. The Blue Lupine looks out onto Mussel Ridge Cove and southern Penobscot Bay.  Friday dinner will be at 26 Split Rock Cove, after which we will begin our writing together.

Saturday, after breakfast at the Blue Lupine, Alexis Ivy will lead us through a beach- themed generative writing session where we will be studying coastal poetry, and, through a series of writing prompts and sea-breeze activities, we will create the dawning of multiple poems.  Lunch will be provided, and then time to write, or walk, or kayak, or take a short trip into Rockland to go to the Farnsworth Museum, or the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.  We will finish the afternoon with a workshop, and then head out for dinner at the Causeway Restaurant in Spruce Head.

On Sunday, after breakfast again at the Blue Lupine, Eric Hyett will be our instructor. The lesson for Sunday will yield at least one full-length translation (from English into English) of one of our poems from Saturday. Lunch will be provided. The afternoon will include a reading and (as a collective response to the reading) the creation of a collaborative poem called a cento.

For those staying over on Sunday night, we will enjoy a casual dinner together.

Finally, on Monday October 9, there is an optional day trip to Monhegan Island. Monhegan is one of Maine’s most remote islands, and is known as the home of winter lobsters. The ferry departs Port Clyde, Maine at 10:30 A.M. and returns to Port Clyde around 5:30PM.

Please reserve your spot for this workshop by September 29, 2023.

Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She lives in her hometown, Boston and teaches in the PoemWorks community.

Eric E. Hyett is a poet and Japanese translator from Brookline, MA. His translated books (with Spencer Thurlow) are “Sonic Peace,” (shortlisted for 2018 National Translation Award),  and “Is It Poetry?” (winner of 2021-2022 Sibley Prize from the University of Chicago). Eric’s first book of poetry, “Aporia,” was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2022.