In this new poetry workshop, you will consider what liberties writer take when recreating, representing, and exposing experience, especially the experiences of others. Topics of interest will include reportage, historical narratives, interviews, poetic license, subjectivity, genre, and form. Through thoughtful exercises, you will learn how to look at your work in new way and write poems engaged in the social realm.

Does writing history, as Walter Benjamin states, mean to cite history? What liberties do writers take when recreating, representing, and exposing experience, especially the experience of others? Does the lyric have a place in all of this? What about empathy? Is the duty of the writer to capture, or to reconstruct? What do we demand of creative writing that we don’t demand of journalism, and vice versa? What constitutes information? How can writers use the visual to expand upon the capabilities of the written word?

In this workshop, we will consider all of these questions as ways to inspire new work. Other topics will include, but are not limited to: quotation, reproduction, representation, reportage, reference, historical narrative, interview, point of view, photography, found text, erasure, listing, footnotes, aestheticization, appropriation, poetic license, subjectivity, objectivity, genre, and form.

This class will provide exercises that propel us out of our own solitary existence, so that we can write poems engaged in the social realm. We will also turn toward historic and contemporary examples to guide us, and for opportunities for imitation. One-on-one conferences following the class will take place over Skype.