Poetry Center in the RCAH

On October 23, 2007, the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities officially opened the Center for Poetry with a reading by MSU and RCAH poet Anita Skeen. Housed in the RCAH's new quarters in the Snyder-Phillips residence complex, the Center will provide students, faculty, staff, and community members with a poetry library, workshop space, a reading room, and a place for conversation about poetry and other arts. Its mission is to encourage the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry and to create an awareness of its place and power in our everyday lives.

The poet's keen eye for beautiful detail and steady voice in times of trouble will be ever-present in the RCAH – in our classes, in our performances, and in our conversations. A center for poetry will not only highlight the importance of poetry but the need today, perhaps more than ever, to encourage the poets in our world. As we build this new Center within a new College, we are reminded by the poet Adrienne Rich in "The School Among the Ruins" that even teachers and students have not lost sight of why we are here.

How the good teacher loved
his school the students
the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches

lemonade and milk
the classroom glass cages
of moss and turtles
teaching responsibility

The Center for Poetry will host poets who will share their work with students through readings, formal workshops, informal conversation, and one-on-one tutorials. There will be a poetry archive for Michigan writers within and outside the MSU community, and undergraduate poets will bring poetry to local public schools. The Center also will have an ongoing relationship with the Fall Writing Festival at Ghost Ranch Conference Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico, allowing students to be part of a community of writers from all over the country for one week in October and to enroll in workshops taught by established writers from across the country. In the future the Center will host similar summer workshops of its own.

The Center will work closely with the MSU Press, the College of Arts and Letters, the Women's Resource Center, Canadian Studies, Residence Life, the MSU Library, the Public Humanities Collaborative, and many other units across campus. For example, we will work with the MSU Press to include the poetry it publishes in the Center's reading room and archive, to make books available for purchase at the Center's public readings, and to develop a new poetry series.

In spring 2008 RCAH will offer a first course in Book Arts, a workshop that will present students with a history of books, publishing, and fine art printing. Students will produce broadsheets of their own poetry and poems by established poets as a component of the course, as well as participate in poetry workshops. Guest artists and scholars will come from such diverse fields as studio art, creative writing, MSU Special Collections, MSU Press, and the United States Library of Congress. We will also have the expertise of letterpress printers from across the state of Michigan.

Students involved in the Creative Writing Option offered through the Department of English at MSU will be able to participate in the Books Arts and other workshops, as will students in graphic design, history, and communications. Gradually, we envision an interdisciplinary Book Arts Specialization that will operate hand in glove with the Poetry Center.