POETRY ROUNDTABLE with JEANNE MINAHAN

A Musing in Poetry... Reading and Workshop

We have all heard of the Muse, and we know how reluctant our Muses can be though we invite them, implore them, to help us write. We’ve also experienced the amusing in poems, how sounds and words can generate smiles, chuckles, or even guffaws. In this Reading and Workshop, we’ll spend time musing with one another: listening to poems and writing our own. Who knows, perhaps we’ll sense the inspiration of an amusing Muse musing with us as we discover new timbres to the music of the soul.

Back by popular demand, The Coudert Institute is please to welcome JEANNE MINAHAN. Please join us for this 2 Day Workshop (on FEBRUARY 24 & FEBRUARY 25) which will explore both the reading and writing of poetry.  Dr. Minahan will also be sharing readings from her extensive collection of works such as... 

Beginnings

Weave me a name

on the loom of life

weave me like a yarn

someone else has spun

from the slender threads

of your names, my name.

In her poems, JEANNE MINAHAN traces life’s magnetic rhythms: that lost voice echoing, sea bell resounding, scratch of pencil on thick paper. Her poems ask: How does memory beckon us with sound? How does the unknown call to us, until we feel a heart-surge of delight to hum its tune?

Jeanne’s work has been set by numerous composers and has been performed in over 40 concerts throughout North America and in Paris. Discography includes Grammy and Pulitzer-prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon’s setting of “The Singing Rooms” with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and composer Michael Djupstrom’s setting of “Oars in Water,” recorded by the Brooklyn Art Song Society.

New work to be performed in the 2022-23 season includes a commission from soprano Emily Albrink for a song-cycle. “Weave Me a Name,” featuring seven of Jeanne’s poems, set by composer Rene Orth, will premiere in 2022. Future collaborations include a 2023 commission from LyricFest for a song cycle. Last spring, Jeanne conducted a two-day reading and workshop for the Coudert Institute in West Palm Beach and she will return in 2023. She has been published in Potomac Review, Cimarron Review, and Women's Review of Books and other journals.

Minahan earned her B.A. from Bucknell University and studied as a Rotary International Graduate Fellow at the University College Cork, Ireland, where she earned an M.A. She completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College. Jeanne Minahan, the pen name of Jeanne Minahan McGinn, teaches creative writing and literature at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she holds the Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Jr. Chair in the Liberal Arts and is Senior Associate Dean.