Special Craft Talk With Kwame Dawes

One of the kindest persons and finest poets and teachers of poetry you’ll ever meet, Kwame Dawes will enlighten us all when he delivers the following craft talk at the 2022 Festival

NEWS FROM THE MIDDLE WAY

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt

Grounded in a close reading of a passage from T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker”, Dawes ekes out hidden and exposed lessons about the life and practice of poetry and art as a poet might encounter it in the peculiar moment in history that we have come upon.