Saturdays, September 28th, October 5th and 12th, 2024, 1:00PM-3:00PM in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room.

I hope you’ll join me in a focused exploration of mythopoetics, a subject I have personally delved into—sometimes by assignment and sometimes by wandering along the way into discovery—for many years. Mythopoesis offers poets an approach to material that is “too hot” or “too close” to handle directly. It creates a framework that offers us the perspective we may need to write a particular and perhaps challenging poem. Mythopoetics is not a poetic genre but a mode of writing, an approach to the world we live in, but refracted through the lens of our inherited stories. Together we’ll consider what “mythopoesis” does and what we think of it by reading two of the great long poems written by women in the 20th century: H.D.’s Trilogy (Part 1, “The Walls Do Not Fall”) and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “In the Mecca.” We’ll discuss them both for meaning and method. What does mythopoetics add to a poem, and what does it make possible for the poet to explore? The answers—like the questions—will likely be inconclusive, multiple, and open-ended. I ask each of you to bring a perspective that amplifies our thinking about the relevance of myth to art today. We’ll spend two of three sessions discussing the notion of mythopoesis, and the two poems. The last session we’ll devote to your questions, concerns—and the poem(s) / prose poem(s) you’ve written for the class over the three weeks we will have worked together! We’ll undertake, each of us, a “hero’s journey” into the mythic mind, the “collective unconscious,” and we’ll share our discoveries and questions, as well as a poem or two. I’m excited to see what we’ll find!

Wednesday, October 16th, 2024, 5:00PM-7:00PM in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room.

In this class, we will consider the possibilities for a daily poetic practice by looking at innovative writers and their innovative approaches to daily writing. We will look at Bernadette Mayer’s list of journal ideas, Kimiko Hahn and Harryette Mullen’s tanka journals, William Carlos Williams’ writings on his prescription pads, José García Villa’s practice of versifying found prose, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Instagram posts, and Edgar Garcia’s poetic record of his nightmares after reading the journals of Christopher Columbus. We will talk about journals, notebooks, pillow books, commonplace books, and social media posts. Based upon our readings, we will also participate in writing exercises—generating new work and sharing some of it out loud.

Saturdays, October 26th and November 2nd, 2024, 10:00AM-12:00PM in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room.

How does one write about a diagnosis so enormous that it seems often beyond the imagination?  In this generative poetry writing intensive, cancer survivor and prize-winning poet Pamela Uschuk will guide writers through the challenges and opportunities of writing about life-threatening diagnoses.  Life-threatening diagnoses are ultimately humbling--not only for the patient, but for friends and relatives who are forced to face their own relationship to living and to dying.  In the two sessions, particpants will look at how other writers such as Jane Kenyon, Meena Alexander, Audre Lorde, Mary Tall Mountain, Christian Wiman, Michael Harper, Dean Young, Jennifer Franklin, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Rainy Dawn Ortiz and others have written about their own diagnoses and dire illnesses. The workshop is open to everyone, including those with direct or indirect experience with difficult diagnoses. Participants will receive writing prompts, will have time to write and share their work with other participants.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2024, 5:00PM-7:00PM in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room.

In this workshop, we will look at Robert Haas’ ‘notebook’ poems and think about the form of the notebook. How might the notebook provide both a flexible and sturdy form for lyric meditation? What does a notebook form offer us as poets when we see our meditations as interconnected but not necessarily next to each other or the proximity between the meditations is looser? In this workshop we will close-read and begin writing our own Notebook poems thinking about what meditational material might want to reside in community / next to each other.