Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Doug Holder to teach: Residencies at the Asylum: Poets at McLean Hospital / Newton Community Education / Starting Jan 12, 2010











To register for "...Poets at McLean Hospital" contact:

Newton Community Education http://newtoncommunityed.org

360 Lowell Ave
Newton, MA 02460-1831
(617) 559-6999



McLean Hospital is known as a top shelf psychiatric hospital with Harvard faculty psychiatrists, groundbreaking research, etc... But it also has been a residency of sorts for poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton. Poet Doug Holder worked at McLean Hospital for 27 years and ran poetry groups for patients for over a decade. He has interviewed the social worker for Plath and Sexton as well as the manager of Anne Sexton's rock band, he wrote an introduction to Lowell's classic poem about the hospital "Waking In the Blue" for Robert Pinsky's anthology "America's Favorite Poems", he was interviewed by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam for material for his controversial book "Gracefully Insane" and has talked to many others who provided a trove of anecdotes about these renowned and tragic poets. In this course we will cover McLean Hospital as a muse for their poetry, and the experience of these poets in the "Asylum."



Newton Community Education newtoncommunityed.org

360 Lowell Ave
Newton, MA 02460-1831
(617) 559-6999

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