About the Workshop

The Romantic poet William Blake said that poetry and art are ways to converse with paradise. So, it is no wonder that these two art forms intersect and feed off of one another in his work and in the poetry of so many others. Poetry and the visual arts have been wedded since the ancient Greeks, and luckily the tradition of poems engaging in some sort of dialogue with visual works of art (be it paintings, sculpture, media installations, etc.) is still alive and well today in the works of such poets at Natasha Trethewey, Diane Seuss, Steve Gehrke, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kevin Young, and many others. In this generative workshop we will look at several diverse ways to approach and engage with visual art. Because we are surrounded by all types of art here in Provincetown, I will encourage you to search the galleries, museums, and public spaces for works that speak to you. You can use these pieces to generate new, exciting poems. Expect to leave the workshop with four new poems!

About the Instructor

Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Bomb, The New Yorker, and World Literature Today among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.