ASL 2012: Guest Poet, Betsy Warland

Betsy Warland trained as a painter, is the author of 11 books, and would be a composer if she were not a writer. A distinguishing feature of her writing is the un-inscribes space on the page as a resonating field of pacing and meaning; of the inferred, the not-said.


A number of Warland suite of poems have been the textual source for song cycles composed by Elizabeth Raum and Lloyd Burritt. Raum’s CD featuring one of these collaborative cycles won the Western Music Award in 2007. Burritt’s collaborative cycle, Yellow the Sweet Ache was premiered at VISI in 2010. Warland has also written an operatic play based on Vivaldi’s operas and papal ban. Her well-received 2010 book, Breathing the Page – Reading the Act of Writing, is a collection of twenty-four essays on the forces that lie beneath the language of craft.