Work with award-winning poet Edward Vidaurre to dismantle the obstacles that stop your creative process. By welcoming pain and allowing the beauty of the same pain to flow in your writing, you will learn to write without reserve. In week two, we will focus on practical aspects of the poetry publishing process.
This workshop will explore the paradox of writing the Ineffable: how to describe what is almost gone, the lost moment, extreme beauty, depth of fleeting feeling. We will discuss the different techniques used in the work of Jorie Graham, Susan Stewart, and Joanna Klink, three poets that capture the Ineffable. We will generate work of our own, for deep discussion in this collaborative workshop.
Welcome! Our four-hour virtual poetry/paragraph workshop will focus on writing as a gift – to us, and from us to others. What do we already have in our vast realms of material? What new knowledge has been given to us during these past strange seasons? What have we left untouched for a long time? Where might we find a new treasure in what we thought we knew?
This four-week generative workshop aims to encourage all us “Zoom’ed out” poets to zoom out in another sense: to embrace a broader view of what poetry can be on the page, the screen, and beyond. The workshop assumes that we don’t have to choose between print and digital (we can dig it all!), and that we can grow, innovate, and heal by bringing our writing closer to our everyday lives. For inspiration, we will examine work by a range of poets (artists’ books, smartphone poetry, hybrid forms of storytelling and collaboration), with special attention to diasporic and border-crossing poets whose work stresses the complex intersections of embodied space, writing, and technologies. We will work with 1-2 prompts per week, with the option to keep generating new pieces or to experiment with and reimagine existing ones. Our focus will be on solo work, but we will also try to daydream collaborative projects beyond market expectations of an atomized productivity.
