Big, Bad Words

Jake Adam York is a poet and a lover of poetry. But he's wise enough to realize that most people just aren't comfortable with verse, perhaps because they don't know how to make sense of it. "The things we fear about poetry are the things that are good about poetry,"...

By Susan Froyd

January 24, 2008

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Jake Adam York is a poet and a lover of poetry. But he's wise enough to realize that most people just aren't comfortable with verse, perhaps because they don't know how to make sense of it. "The things we fear about poetry are the things that are good about poetry," he says. It's those very qualities — spare language and compressed meaning — that York will try to explain during Who's Afraid of Poetry?, a four-part lecture series hosted by the Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar and designed to dispense with that whole miasma of misunderstanding that throws people off.

The first session begins tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Lab, 404 South Upham Street in Lakewood; classes continue every other Tuesday through March 11. Registration is $72 (or $52 for Lab members); go to www.belmarlab.org or call 303-934-1777.
Tue., Jan. 29, 2008

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Susan Froyd started writing for Westword as the "Thrills" editor in 1992 and never quite left the fold. These days she still freelances for the paper in addition to walking her dogs, enjoying cheap ethnic food and reading voraciously. Sometimes she writes poetry.

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