Expanding Our Poetic Range through Memory, Place, and the Senses

This workshop is for poets of any level of experience who are seeking to expand the range of their subject matter. Limited to 12 participants.

How, as writers, can we break the surface of the everyday and go deep? Over the eight sessions of the workshop, we will take some time to dwell in the places our writers’ sensibility can travel to when we tune in to our senses and journey into memory and place. The aim of this workshop will be to generate a rich pool of new material, from which our best work can emerge.

Workshops will consist of in-class writing exercises, weekly writing assignments, and time for participating poets to receive constructive feedback from their peers and the workshop leader. As a group, we will also perform close readings of works by a range of published writers that constellate around a series of themes selected to help us mine our own memories and sensory experiences of the world around us. Proposed themes include

• a child’s-eye view: writing through the lens of childhood;
• lost and found: orienting through poetry;
• (re)mapping our world: a sense of place;
• entering the myth: poetic exchanges with mythology; and
• mapping the landscape of the body.

Participants will be encouraged, for the duration of the workshop, to “apprentice” themselves to the work of a published poet of their choice, whose voice will be a steady and nourishing guide as they work on their own material. They will also have the opportunity (though it is by no means obligatory) to read their own work aloud, both as a practice tool for giving future poetry readings and to “lend an ear” to the editing process. The workshop will be a safe and friendly space, with an emphasis on diving into the messiness of creation and getting excited about new ideas.