The Writer's Desk features the desks and writing practices of Gemini Ink faculty, visiting authors, teaching artists, volunteers, students, interns, staff, partners and more. Receive new posts in your inbox...
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Join master poetry teacher Veronica Golos on an international poetry tour. Next stop: the Middle East! In this four-week generative poetry workshop we will read, discuss deeply and draw our inspiration from foundational poets Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), Etel Adnan (Lebanon), Saadi Youssef (Iraq), and contemporary Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif. We will explore each poet’s craft tools and apply these techniques to our own work.
Whether a writer is talking directly to God or using religious reflection to try and make sense of humanity, poetry is shrouded in spiritual mystery and is often used to explore both concrete and intangible concepts of a higher power.
In this three-week workshop, we will study impactful poems from three women poets who invoke ideas of God or the gods. Louise Gluck’s book The Wild Iris enlists flowers from the garden of eden to help tell a story. Lucille Clifton’s “brothers” is an eight-poem conversation between an aged Lucifer and God. Natalia Toledo’s body of written work speaks to the Zapotec gods in three languages: Zapotec, Spanish, and English.
What brings a poem from a first-person narrative, to what has been termed Confessional poetry? Looking at poems by groundbreaking poets Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, and Ai, we will explore how these women poets broke through barriers of sex and language, how they shaped their work, and, using their examples, we will break through our own boundaries. A packet will be sent to participants before the workshop, with poems from each of the poets and background information of their eras, along with suggestions for our own writing. Each participant will write 3 poems, inspired by each of these Confessional poets, and poems by participants will be read carefully and discussed.
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.