The anthology Blended Voices: Blending the Voices of Virginia began as a Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV) workshop I designed during the PSV Centennial year (2023). The Centennial theme was to celebrate the diverse voices of Virginia poets. I conceived of the idea of highlighting historic Virginia poets from diverse backgrounds, with the aim of blending their voices with those of diverse contemporary Virginia poets. The second goal was to educate participants about historic Virginia poets as they prepared to blend their voices with those of the historic poets.
We had a small, enthusiastic group of participants for the workshop I ran in Richmond, Virginia, on May 6th, 2023, during the PSV Centennial Festival. The format of the workshop was slightly different from that of this book. In the workshop, participants picked poetry lines at random from four color-coded bins, one for each historic Virginia poet. The lines had been excised from two different poems by each historic Virginia poet: Edgar Allan Poe, Ruby Altizer Roberts, Anne Spencer, and Karenne Wood. Together, these authors represent several of Virginia’s demographics: Caucasian male (Poe), Caucasian female (Roberts), African-American female (Spencer), and Native-American (Monacan) female (Wood). The workshop participants then created their own poems, using the four lines they had randomly chosen from the work of these historic poets. I presented a second workshop via Zoom to another set of participants.
For the book, I decided to extend the challenge to all Poetry Society of Virginia members. Since the contributors would be working remotely, they were presented the same two poems from each of the four historic poets—a total of eight—and invited to choose one line from one poem by each poet. From these lines, or woven around these lines, they each created a novel poem, thus adding their voices to those of the historic poets.
As the reader will find, the result is a joyful selection of widely different poetic contents and styles. Most of the historic poems are reprinted in the beginning of the book, so the reader can understand the original intent and experience the historic poets’ voices before they are blended with voices from contemporary Virginia poets.
Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate, Emerita, has been kind enough to add her editing expertise and keen poetic eye to the process of compiling the anthology. We hope you enjoy the resulting collection, and that the blending of voices it represents will foster a further blending of Virginia’s diverse peoples and cultures.
Kathleen P. Decker - Past Vice President, Eastern Region, Poetry Society of Virginia
