The South Carolina Poetry Initiative, a new statewide program based in the USC English Department, has been organized to promote and celebrate the poetic arts and build a more diverse audience for writers in the state.

The kick-off event was a public master class led by Whiting Prize-winning poet Terrance Hayes and facilitated by South Carolina's Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth Dec. 6. The reading by three-time award winning poet Terrance Hayes included original settings of Hayes' poems to musical arrangements composed by Kevin Simmonds, a Ph.D. candidate in music.

The South Carolina Poetry Initiative is the brain child of poet and author Kwame Dawes, English, who assumed the directorship of this multifaceted program after a two-year appointment as director of the MFA program in English at USC. Along with a team of students and other faculty members, Dawes conceived of a project that would sponsor workshops, develop poetry programs in libraries across the state, organize poetry contests (including a South Carolina Poetry Book Prize), hold poetry collaborations with museums, arrange poetry residences, create projects for workshops in shelters, community centers, and in the medical community, host a summit of poets in the state and create a far reaching program of activities for schools statewide.

Projects that have been implemented include the three-year-old Split P Soup, which promotes the writing of poetry in schools and encourages research on the pedagogy of teaching creative writing, two areas which now fall under the umbrella of the Poetry Initiative. Initial efforts from this outreach program are proving the link between appreciation of poetry and the writing/thinking skills of students at all levels. Another initiative is the year-old Frisson Project, a collaboration with the Columbia Museum of Art which brings poets, writers, and musicians into the museum to create new work based on exhibited art. The new work is then performed before audiences the first Friday of each month. Plans call for a Poetry in Motion series which will bring writers into informance arenas for readings and workshops. A statewide Poetry Summit, proposed for Spring 2004, will bring writers together to discuss and promote their work to a wider audience of readers. The Poetry Initiative has forged a series of partnerships with like-minded agencies, including the South Carolina Arts Commission and the Poet Laureate's office.

For more information, contact Dawes at DawesK@gwm.sc.edu or 7-2230.

12/03