Natalie Diaz begins a recent craft talk, “Building The Emotional Image,” considering the interplay between images, story, and history in her poems, reflecting on how her images “mostly come from my home, the place where my brain was formed and where all the little electrical circuits in my brain learned to fire.” In this course, we’ll follow her lead, exploring the infinite possibilities of our own obsessions, interests, and memories. Each session will be devoted to generative writing, the creation of new work, and chances to discuss the surprising drafts that emerge.

This workshop will focus on the ways the visual arts informs poetry, not just in writing in and about visual art (architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, installation and public art), but also the ways that the visual arts can help us to re-see our writing practice. How can the visual arts expand our idea of the poem, our practice of making, and help us access inspiration and stimulate our sensibilities?

From first draft to final draft, we require strategies for seeing the whole poem, both its full potential for content and its most satisfying form. We require, as Charles Olson said, the intense perception of the first draft—to “see” not only the spark but all of the light that makes a poem glow. Then we need to “re-see” the poem, practicing the kind of deep revision that leads us to reconsider everything from word choice and vivid image to metaphoric subtext, grammatical pattern, and inner music of the poem. We’ll use poems from such poets as Anne Carson, C. D.

Please join Jonathan Blunk and special guests Anne Wright and Donna Masini to celebrate James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the authorized biography of the poet just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Blunk has spent decades researching and writing the book, which has been honored by glowing reviews since its appearance this fall. A good friend of Poets House founders Elizabeth Kray and Stanley Kunitz, Wright “comes through vividly on almost every page,” The New York Times declared.

In workshops, we sometimes talk about how a poem needs to raise its stakes, but what does that mean? Stakes can be as simple as what's literally at stake for a speaker in the poem's story—maybe their marriage or even their life is at risk. But often the tricky part is making the reader invest in the poem's outcome, getting the reader to care and feel that the poem is exploring something important. In this workshop, we will look at how poems engage their readers and make their readers care. We'll do close readings of poems by C.D.