train of thought : chard de niord and bruce smith

Four day workshop traveling across Canada
limited to 16 participants
November 10–14, 2006

Tuition: $2689 Canadian Dollars includes train travel with sleeping coach, meals, Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto (approximately $2200 US at January 2006 exchange rate); $429 CN supplement for private room on the train per person. Travel to and from Toronto / Vancouver at participant’s own expense.

Registration deadline: September 10
Application Form

This is a rare opportunity for participants to spend several days with a two distinguished poets, Bruce Smith and Chard deNiord. Participants will write and discuss their work under the guidance of these two noted poets as the group travels across Canada by rail. Critiques, readings, craft lectures and one-on-one discussions will be set against the backdrop of the dramatic Canadian Rockies. During the day the focus will be on one’s own writing following a morning craft lecture; readings and discussions will follow in the evening, accompanied by good food and wine.

“My heart is warm with the friends I’ll make

And the friends I’ll not be knowing

But there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take

No matter where it’s going.”

– Edna St. Vincent Millet

Boarding Via Rail's vista-domed Canadian in Toronto for the trip of a lifetime across the Canadian Shield, spanning the prairies and through the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver. Four nights total; the first in a grand railway hotel, then three on board in cozy sleeping car accommodations; three full days of thrilling scenery and unforgettable poetry!

TRAIN OF THOUGH PROGRAM: The Long Journey Out of the Self

Day One Panel: "The Heartsickness, The Homesickness"

As a point of departure we will assemble as a group for introductions and for the first panel: The Heartsickness, The Homesickness. . .

The discussion will center around locating and using the biographical stuff of our lives and transforming it into words and licking those words into the shape of poems. The instructors will have a dialogue with students about "picking on the things that pick on them,"and having the pressures of form and language shape their thought into feeling into word.

Workshop.

Students will be asked to bring poems for discussion in a workshop format.

Readings both appreciative and critical will occur as as the instructors read the work of the students and give the poems a comprehensive reading both intensive and extensive.

Writing, reflecting, revising.

A break in the afternoon affords time for students to read, write, and revise poems they've written.

Evening reading by faculty.

Question and Answer and Reception.

Day Two Panel: The Limits of the Lyric: Confusion, Fragmentation and Unknowing

In this lecture I will discuss the cognitive and emotional limitations of the lyric in relation to inherent mysteries of human experience. We will examine effective ambiguities, poignant points of confusions, and transcendent confessions in the conclusions of poems by Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck and Ann Carson. In each example, we will focus on the question of where knowing leaves off and “unknowing” begins, as well as the various ways in which the above poets achieve enduring “broken music” (Roethke) in their lyric concessions to what Keat’s called “uncertainty.”

Workshop

Writing, reflecting, revising.

Evening reading by students.

Day Three Panel: The Large and Diminutive I, Two Strategies Of Voice In Lyric Poetry

In this panel we will concentrate on the two natures of the self in the lyric tradition of American poetry: the small yet ironically resonant expression of “the diminished thing” (Frost) and the large, inclusive voice that “contains multitudes” (Whitman). We will examine specific poems

(Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” sections from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Bishop’s “Poem,” Lowell’s “Eye and Tooth,” Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” Jarrell’s “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” and Gerald Stern’s “The Founder”) that demonstrate how voice, in both its large and diminutive expressions, helps determine the lyric strategy of a poem. We will raise the following aesthetic questions in this context: What marks the difference between mere lyricized experience and enduring transcendent expression? How do the speakers in the above poems navigate between narcissism and unredeemable contradiction? We ask that students please come prepared with questions of their own on this topic, and at least one answer.

Workshop

Reading, revising, reflecting.

Final Reading and Recitations.

ABOUT THE TRIP:

The three-day trek across Canada is considered by many to be one of the most outstanding train journeys in the world. The scenery is truly breathtaking in its scope and grandeur.

We will assemble in Toronto during the day on Friday, November 10, with accommodations at The Fairmont Royal York, one of Canada’s finest hotels. The Royal York is a classic; built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 20th century, it epitomizes the grand era of railway travel, with magnificent lobby and beautifully appointed rooms. That evening we’ll meet for informal fun and fellowship, then retire for our final night on land. Saturday morning we head - literally across the street - to Toronto Union Station and board the last great North American streamline train still operating, Via Rail’s Canadian.

Leaving Toronto, the train travels north through woodlands, passing through Parry Sound on the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, up to the lunar landscape of the nickel-mining area of Sudbury before heading west across the vast, unpeopled Canadian Shield. Rock and muskeg give way to the north woods during the night, with the next day bringing an almost unbelievable viewing experience to the traveler - hour upon hour of scenery unbroken by human habitation except for isolated hunting camps and tiny villages. Leaving Ontario behind after 1800 kilometers, the Canadian arrives at Winnipeg on the Great Plains Sunday afternoon.

After an hour long break, the journey continues across the prairies, through the wind-swept expanse of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, past Brandon and Saskatoon, pulling into Edmonton at eight Monday morning, before its final vigorous assault on the mountains. The train spends the day climbing the foothills of the Rockies, bursting into magnificent Jasper National Park in early afternoon, with moose, mule deer and abundant wildlife visible from the train. An hour's break in Jasper allows for leg-stretching in this small mountain town, where elk congregate in the rail yards to feed on spillage from the grain cars. After departure from Jasper the Canadian crests the Continental Divide at Tete Jaune (Yellowhead) Pass, through some of the most jaw-dropping scenery on the North American continent - past Mt. Robson, the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, through deep pine forests, breathtaking vistas and thundering waterfalls. During the night, the train follows the canyons of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, twisting and turning beside deep chasms, the flanges of the wheels squealing against the rails, the headlight of the locomotives playing against the raw stone face of the cliffs. Arrival in Vancouver, with its temperate rain forest climate, is at eight Tuesday morning. From there participants may return home, or are welcome to stay additional days in this magnificent city, at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, at a special group rate.

ABOUT THE TRAIN:

There is no other train like the Canadian in the world. With lovingly restored 1950’s equipment, including stainless steel-sheathed sleeping cars, dining and lounge cars and glass-topped two-story 360 degree Vista-Dome observation cars, the Canadian is a living testament to the glory days of rail travel. This was equipment specifically designed and built to travel across Canada: when you step on board the Canadian, you step back in time.

Train of Thought will take place on board in Via Rail’s first class Silver & Blue sleepers with unlimited access to the bullet-ended Mural Lounge and first-class dome of the "Park Car" on the rear of the train, to the white-linen, fresh flowers and exceptional meals in the dining car.

Each Train of Thought participant is provided with sleeping car accommodations (lower or upper berth). By day, you’ll have a seat by a wide picture window. By night, you have a full bed, complete with crisp sheets, blankets and pillows. Shower facilities are provided. Meals are included and are prepared fresh on board, with the kitchen able to meet special dietary requirements. The two lounges are fully stocked with beverages and the dining car carries a variety of Canadian wines to accompany dinner.

Private-room sleeper space is available at a $429 CN per person surcharge. Private sleeper space varies from single-person Roomettes (with sink and toilet in room) to two-or-three-person Double or Triple Bedrooms (enclosed lavatory, and sink) to the ultimate luxury, a Double Bedroom Suite, accommodating up to four persons. Whichever way you decide to go, few things in life compare to long-distance train travel in a sleeper!

faculty

Bruce Smith is the author of five books of poems, most recently, Songs for Two Voices (University of Chicago, 2005). Poems in this collection have appeared in The Best American Poetry , 2003 and 2004. His fourth book, The Other Lover (University of Chicago, 2000) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, The American Poetry Review, and many others. Essays and reviews of his have appeared in Harvard Review, Boston Review and Newsday. He has been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship as well as twice receiving grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Arts.

Chard deNiord is the author of Asleep in the Fire. He is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and directs the New England College MFA Program in poetry. He lives in Putney, Vermont. About his recent book, Sharp Golden Thorn, Li-Young Lee comments: “Here is a heavy book, a voice from a walled garden, the meditations of one wrestling with knowledge and ignorance, the end product of a long and rigorous alchemy.”DeNiord’s most recent book is entitled, “Night Mowing” published by Iowa University Press.