Local poets in need of some constructive criticism have a new resource at their disposal. Joel Lipman, former professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo, and Lucas County Poet Laureate from 2008-2013, has opened ABRACADABRA Studio of Poetics, in Downtown Toledo. Lipman says Toledo is overdue for a studio-style approach to teaching poetry. "We have private teachers of piano, of voice, of glassblowing, and there are even two or three jazz teachers in Toledo, so why not poetry?"
ABRACADABRA will offer an intimate poetic learning environment—the room only has a dozen seats, but Lipman hopes to cap his classes at eight students. “The ABRACADABRA workshops will be personal, where every person gets his or her say,” he said.
At the studio's open house on Wednesday, November 14, the room slowly filled with local writers, who passed around samples of their work, and read one another's poems out loud. Lipman led discussions, dissecting the pieces with intense attention to detail.
Different verses
Lipman promises that learning poetry at ABRACADABRA will not be like taking a college poetry class—there is no curriculum, and sessions there will take many forms, like focused group conversations, workshops, and one-on-one tutorials. He intends ABRACADABRA to be unlike any other poetry effort in Toledo, and unlike what he's done in the past.
"I wanted to be able to teach the great master poets that I studied from without having to move on to other things,” Lipman said, meaning poets like his mentor Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. "One of the things Gwendolyn taught me is that you've got to be local—local is critical." In that spirit, he hopes ABRACADABRA will be a perfect fit for a city with a strong literary community, thanks to the support of local colleges and libraries.
Why? So serious
Lipman believes in a potential audience of "serious" writers of poetry both published and unpublished. He saw the possibility of urban poetic audiences after experiencing the national poetry slam finals in Boston this past August and seeing "hundreds of poets, dozens of venues and thousands of people in packed houses up and down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge." Lipman admits, however, that his workshops will probably focus more on written texts than verbal slam-style poetry.
ABRACADABRA has opened and Lipman is planning his courses, which he says will go on for four or five weeks at ten to fifteen dollars per class.
ABRACADABRA Studio of Poetics, 23 N. Huron St., second floor above Gathered Studio
and Gallery. abracadabrapoetry.com