WORKSHOPS

Poetry creates pleasure in the mind of the reader as much by disenchantment as by enchantment, as much by stripping our illusions away as by reinforcing and enabling them. We will closely examine the musical and rhetorical dynamics by which this process is enacted, in both canonical poems and the poems of workshop members, and expose the ways in which the tensions, contradictions, dissonances, and dramas of experience are integrated into the wholistic representation that is the successful poem. We will do daily exercises, readings will be provided, and we will not be afraid of looking at things with an eye to their psychic sources.