Memory & Imagination: A Generative Poetry Workshop

9/19/22—9/23/22

We live in an age of memoir, and yet poets are still struggling with issues of poetic truth-telling and responsibility; indeed, poets have always struggled with such concerns because, at its heart, poetry is a medium that often draws on memory, and memory values emotional truth over literal truth. Often, it is assumed that poems are purely autobiographical, but in the search for each poem’s emotional truth, and to reveal and carry this emotional truth in their work, poets often “lie”—they create fictions in the service of those truths. If you are beginning to question the boundaries and relationships between emotional and literal truth, memory and imagination in poems that have an autobiographical imperative, this workshop is an opportunity for you explore such terrain, generate new work, and receive feedback from a small community of supportive, focused writers. In-class and “take-home” writing prompts will jumpstart new work, and a daily in-depth look at poems by master poets will allow us to explore issues of process and craft: how pacing, diction/images, line length, enjambment, white space, rhyme and sound, syntax and grammar enable the poem’s emotion through form. As “homework,” you will be encouraged to work and revise your poems and bring drafts in for workshopping.

Suitable for poets of all levels.

For more information on MISA and to register for this workshop click here.