Poet Kwasny Offers Writing Project For Students
Montana poet laureate Melissa Kwasny’s “Letters to a Young Poet” program seeks to assist Montana students in the creation of epistolary poetry. Kwasny will email participating teachers a “letter poem” addressed to students, which the teacher shares with their class. The letter will offer suggestions and assignments for student responses and often include sample letter poems by other poets, as well as quotations and ideas about writing itself.
Any student in the class who would like to respond by writing a letter poem back to Kwasny, either handwritten or typed, following the assignment in whichever way they want, will send it to her physical post office box. She will write back individually to each student at their home address, commenting on their poem and sometimes slipping in a poem they might enjoy. The first letter must include this signed form from their parents giving permission to correspond with Kwasny.
An epistolary poem is a poem that is written in the form of a letter. Examples are Montana poet Richard Hugo’s letter poems 31 Letters and 13 Dreams and co-poet laureate M. L. Smoker’s letter poems to Hugo and to James Welch. One of the most famous examples is the letters the German poet Ranier Maria Rilke’s wrote to a young, aspiring writer, collected in the book Letters to a Young Poet.
This project is designed to offer an alternative to online learning, and to offer aspiring writers a chance to be pen pals for a while with one of Montana’s poets laureate.
Kwasny is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today and Pictograph, and a collection of essays on the poetic image, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision.
Along with M.L. Smoker, she edited an anthology of poems in defense of global human rights, entitled I Go to the Ruined Place, as well as Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry. Kwasny has been teaching poetry writing in graduate and undergraduate programs and in public schools for over 30 years.
For more information, visit https://www.humanitiesmontana. org/programs/letters- to-a-young-poet-sis/.
