About the Workshop

This workshop will explore the concept that poetry should “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” How does a poem take something ordinary and charge it with wonder and mystery? How does something wild and surreal feel immediately connected to our daily lives? Let’s talk about how that happens. This will be a generative workshop where we’ll write and workshop new poems. Hopefully, when we’re done, we’ll have several new poems, ideas for poems we’ve yet to begin, and a few new tools to carry into the strangeness of our art.

About the Instructor

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.