About the Workshop

In this generative workshop, each day we will go on little walks (mostly on the beach) and write “plein air poems” about the journey as we are making it. Situated in the intersection of ecopoetry, travelogue, and journaling, these poems may (but don’t have to) include visual elements like doodles and drawings. The haibun, a hybrid form of a prose poem followed by a haiku, is equally welcoming of poets and prose writers. Inspired by Basho’s seminal works, we will learn to be aware of the landscape and ourselves so that language can move fluidly between the outside and the inside. We will be fully present to the here and now but also to the interior and deep time. Students may revise their works later, but these “broadside poems” made in real time will also be complete artifacts in themselves. Students will go home with at least four complete haibuns.

About the Instructor

Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, and Best New Poets. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. Originally from Nepal, he is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.