About the Workshop

So much of contemporary poetry is made up of the daily confrontation with the paraphernalia of our (human) convenience: shelter; technology; and politics, etc. In this workshop we will study poems that focus on the natural world, as opposed to the built environment, in works by Yves Bonnefoy, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amy Clampitt, Christopher Okigbo, and Jay Wright. Using methodologies from the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku and objects from nature, we will create and wield talismans to open portals onto the generative plane of the sublime.

About the Instructor

Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review; The American Poetry Review; Callaloo; Literary Imagination; Poem­-A-Day; Poetry; and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s other honors include the Oscar Wilde Award, an Amy Clampitt Residency, the Ambit Prize, and a fellowship from The New York Times Foundation. He is a Fellow and Artistic Director at Cave Canem Foundation. Micheaux’s most recent work is the libretto Sky in a Small Cage.