The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2015

Stanley Kunitz said, “So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn't say as much as in what it does say.” Yet from Edgar Allen Poe’s chanted laments to Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie on the influenza epidemic to Mark Doty’s My Alexandria on AIDS, people turn to poetry to name the unnamable—grief, loss, sorrow. How do poems bring, if not solace or resolution, then understanding to the unknowable? What in the “secret language” of poetry (Kunitz) speaks to the language of grief? And what in the urge to write makes the vessel of poetry able to contain the emotions—successfully or unsuccessfully? Panelists will present and discuss poems, focusing on craft, and look to the audience to contribute their understanding.