The Camden Conference presents “Poets Face Change” on Sunday, November 10 at 1pm at the Cushing Library. The program is facilitated by Ellen Goldsmith and is free and open to all.

You may wonder how a poetry session illuminates this year’s Camden Conference topic. Perhaps not head-on, but poets explore many of  the questions the media revolution raises. And certainly, poets grapple with the shifts and demands of a changing world and a changing self. By probing beneath the surface, uncovering emotional, psychological and social implications, poems speak to our thoughts and emotions.

In this participatory session, ten different people will read and respond to poems from familiar voices like Matthew Arnold and W.S. Auden and from contemporary poets like Naomi Shihab Nye and our current poet laureate Joy Harjo.

Ellen Goldsmith’s books include Where to Look, Such Distances and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect which won the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center 1997 chapbook contest and was described by Dennis Nurkse as an “incandescent collection.” Recent poems have appeared in Antiphon, Connecticut River Review, Dash, Earth’s Daughters, Mount Hope, Off the Coast, Third Wednesday and The Westchester Review. She is professor emeritus of The City University of New York and lives in Cushing, Maine.