CLASSES
The Catalogue:
The Literary Device of Listing Objects, People, Abstract Ideas in Poetry and Prose
Saturday, January 16, 2021
taught by Dr. Robin Carstensen
2 pm to 3:45 pm CST
via Zoom
Click here to register for this free event. Registration closes 1 hour before the event starts.
From Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching to Olga Broumas’s “The Choir,” literature of reverence and irreverence, resistance, and celebration, the literary device of cataloguing in poetry and prose has served us well.
In this class, we'll span the spectrum, including Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” Emmy Perez, our Texas Poet Laureate’s “Green Light Go”. We’ll explore different kinds of listing in memoirs and essays, right up to hot-off-the-press, Tiara Malone’s personal essay, “That Time U Wore Encye Kinda Changed My Life,” in November 2020 of Prairie Schooner. We’ll try our own hand and practice making our own catalogues across the genres.
The Braided Essay
Saturday, February 20, 2021
taught by Sarah K. Lenz
2 pm to 4 pm CST
via Zoom
Click here to register for this free event. Registration closes 1 hour before the event starts.
When you braid an essay, you toss off traditional narrative structure. It’s like “exploding prose in order to put it together again in a new pattern that is inordinately pleasurable,” writes Brenda Miller in
“A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay.” In this generative writing class, learn the features of this unique form, in which we’ll weave three stories together in repeating strands. Surprising juxtapositions happen in braided essays, and themes emerge organically, as the fragmented pieces entwine forming an essay with texture and substance.
Putting the Eye into Poetry:
Exploring Visual Poetry Through Mail Art
Saturday, March 20, 2021
taught by Joshua Bridgwater Hamilton
2 pm to 4 pm CST
via Zoom
Click here to register for this free event. Registration closes 1 hour before the event starts.
Visual poetry has been described as “poetry that presupposes a viewer as well as a reader” (Willard Bohn). Further clarification of this creative mode mentions that a visual poem is, in part, “what happens when the visual qualities of color, orientation, iconographic suggestion, style, and scale, or the graphic potential for organization on a surface and through space, are made integral to the ideas that inform composition” (Johanna Drucker). In this workshop, we will look at examples of visual poetry from a few of the many tendencies within visual poetry. We will comment and discuss handwritten, typography, and collage poems, then work on generating our own visual poems using blank index cards as our canvas. Afterwards, we will share together as a group the works we started, then, if the participants feel so inclined, we can opt to exchange mailing addresses and mail the final visual poem to another participant as a work of mail art (see this wikipedia entry regarding the practice and history of mail art, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_art).
Materials the participants will want to bring to the workshop Zoom meeting:
Index cards - postcard sizing =
Rectangular
At least 3-1/2 inches high x 5 inches long x 0.007 inch thick
No more than 4-1/4 inches high x 6 inches long x 0.016 inches thick
Writing materials - color pencils, inks, pens, typewriters, etc.
Visual materials - magazines, photos, etc. (i.e. for cut-up and collage purposes)
Glue, if intending to collage
Other websites of interest:
Anatol Knotek: https://visual-poetry.tumblr.com
Poetry Magazine articles and poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=visual+poetry
Wikipedia entry on Visual Poetry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_poetry
Fiction-Writing Class:
Topic To Be Announced
Saturday, April 17, 2021
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