About this Event
The Wild Third Voice: Collision, Collusion, and Craft in Poetic Collaboration
Join poets Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, long-time collaborators, for a craft talk and (possibly, hopefully) the chance (you get to choose) to participate in a linked collaborative poem which will 1. celebrate the day, 2. mourn the day, or 3. create our own day. In addition to the renga (ancient Japanese collab form), the team will share their experience with the Surrealists’ “Exquisite Corpse” and the exciting “third voice” they discover when their own voices collide. They’ll share how to write poems that bicker and blend, poems in which two or more poems merge into a single narrative. The surprise and mayhem, the experiments in wickedness, the thrill of the wild third voice will all be springboards and inspiration for future collaborations or, if you choose, collaborations with yourself! (Always rewarding.) Come to listen or participate. All are welcome. Get tickets here.
About Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton: Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have been writing poetry together for almost two decades, and have published several three collaborative books during that period.
Denise Duhamel: Born and raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, poet Denise Duhamel earned a BFA at Emerson College and an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. She lived in New York City from 1985 until 1999. Duhamel writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that fearlessly combine the political, sexual, and ephemeral. Duhamel has published numerous collections of poetry, including Scald (2017), Blowout (2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award, Ka-Ching! (2009), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (2001), and Kinky (1997). She coedited, with Nick Carbó, Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (2002), and, with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007). Duhamel has also collaborated with Seaton on several poetry collections, including Little Novels (2002), Oyl (2000), and Exquisite Politics (1997).Duhamel’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been included in several volumes of Best American Poetry, and has also been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Bill Moyers’s PBS poetry special Fooling with Words. A professor at Florida International University, she lives in Florida.
Maureen Seaton: Maureen Seaton has authored over two dozen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently, Undersea (JackLeg Press, 2021); Zero-Zero (Hysterical Books, 2021), co-authored with Kristine Snodgrass; Myth America (Anhinga Press, 2020), co-authored with Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias; and Sweet World (CavanKerry Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Florida Book Award for Poetry. Her honors include the Iowa Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for Furious Cooking, 1996; a second Lammy for lesbian memoir (Sex Talks to Girls, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, 2018); the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004); and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and numerous anthologies and literary journals. With Samuel Ace, she wrote Stealth (Chax Press, 2012). With Neil de la Flor, she wrote Sinéad O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (Sentence Book Award, Firewheel Editions, 2012) and edited Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos (Anhinga Press, 2018). With Denise Duhamel, she wrote Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015) and edited, with Duhamel and David Trinidad, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Seaton is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami. She was voted Miami’s Best Poet 2020 by the readers of The Miami New Times. Seaton is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir Sex Talks to Girls (2008), in which she addresses motherhood, sobriety, and sexuality. She teaches at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.