Lyric Recovery Festival™
a  p h i l o p h o n e m a™ presentation

Spring 
Festival at
Carnegie Hall

What is ‘lyric’?

Essays 
and 
Interviews

On April 29, LyR culminates 11 sessions in New York, Paris and Prague and crowns the final weekend of National Poetry Month with a festival session at
Carnegie
Weill Recital Hall
featuring
new work performed by
James Ragan
and
Galway Kinnell
an original music program and the final round of international competition
(Judge:
Dana Gioia)

 Typically defined as a ‘single speaker relating his experience of the world,’ the term evokes for many Wordsworthian pastorals, Byron’s Childe Harold or Frost’s elemental Yankee loner. Yet John Berryman, the master of ‘shipwrecked syntax,’ navigated the lyric’s powerful currents as the ‘voice of the other.’ In Ragan’s Hunger Wall, Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, it is the spillway of brute force, the collective undertow of horror.
 Through the intimate bonding of sound and meaning, the lyric poem draws the deepest emotional, the keenest sensual response, its enunciated breath the music that “joins the liberties of sleep with the intensity of extreme wakefulness,” (Valéry) the rhythm and sonority that “respond to man’s immortal need for symmetry and surprise.” (Baudelaire)   
   Lyric is mesmerizing in any language, however rudimentary one’s linguistic, thus, mental apprehension. Once emotionally allied with the piece, the listener imputes his own meaning, as here to a stanza in Suvicnai ("Shoo-veets-NYE"):

Voc mani sloka, sloka tedü,
nu sonic lennia kim debai.
Edevi kum battoy sis bajani,
nev husko fai ranne dari mijü.
O nev nev ranne faisi dari mijai.

   Its first stirrings are rarely verbal; it arrives by emotional sensation, by the internal color, texture, smell of a mood, by an image, pitch, cadence, hum, by the savor of a long vowel. "The poet is engaged on the frontiers of consciousness where words fail, but meanings still exist." (Eliot) This is the zone we inhabit when we enter into dialogue with the poem to transliterate our non-verbal exchange onto the page. Poet accounts solely to poem as the final arbiter of its completion; poem scrutinizes and challenges poet.
   Rilke’s Apollo is headless, limbless, yet every contour of muscle and bone radiates a gaze and a smile.

Denn da ist keine Stelle,        For there is no part of him
die dich nicht sieht.               that does not see you.
Du mußt dein Leben ändern. You must change your life.

   In 11 sessions in New York, Paris and Prague, Lyric Recovery has sought to extend the lyric to full potential, presenting, engendering and visibly rewarding work marked by reach, craft, content and musicality. The 12th culminates with this festival session at Carnegie Hall.
   Huddled since mid-century as "global village" around a dominant source of imagery, sound, even meaning, we must make uncommon use of language to ferry us beyond its perimeter to the essential, shared harmonics.

The Lyric Color Wheel of
Multiple Voice

T.S. Eliot on Sound and Sense

Session Essay:
Boccaccio's Image of
Fortune and Poverty

Stages of Man and Earth:
James Ragan, the poet behind The Hunger Wall

Can Poetry Matter?
(the controversial Atlantic article) by Dana Gioia
(CLICK HERE TO GET THE BOOK)

Interview:
Dana Gioia

Interview:
Ellen Bryant Voigt
author of
The Flexible Lyric

Interview:
Alice Notley

Interview: 
Michel Collot
English / French

Interview: 
Yves Di Manno
English / French 

The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose:
Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling
by Mary Kinzie

Festival Session:

Ticket and Hall Information

Venues:

Paris
Prague
Upcoming

Featured Poet Work:

James Ragan
English/French/German/Czech
Galway Kinnell
English/German
Others

Festival Competition
Submissions Guidelines

Past Award
Recipients

Featured Poet Bios:

Galway Kinnell
James Ragan
Others

Festival program 
and performers

The Lyric Recovery 
Sculptors

Sponsorship and
Ad Space Options

Artists

Works

Sharon Chu

"Jumping Water"

Alex Kveton

"Swan Lake"

Lubomir Tomaszewski

TBA

Kudrova

TBA