Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 5:30PM - 7:30PM
Meeting will take place in the Poetry Center's Alumni Room, Room 205; limit 12 students. General registration now open!
Poetry is an ancient form of expression that holds spiritual and existential depth, a medium to speak the “unutterable.” Yet it is a form of great intimacy, often spoken from the first-person and drawing heavily upon autobiographical events. How can the self grasp something beyond itself in poetry? The freedom and self-sufficiency of a poem is born out of a single human consciousness—yet the poet must abandon herself to dizzying array of dream-like realities, wedded with the external reality. Importantly, she must relinquish much of the social language familiar to her in communication, and “speak in the mask of the first person,” (Franz Wright). How can we appreciate the ancient prophetic act of poetry again, in which our own language feels unfamiliar to us, and from “somewhere else”? This seminar and generative workshop will enhance opportunities of writing outside of what we think we know, through embracing the fungibility of pronouns, I & Thou, addressee and addressed, veil and re-velation in poetry. We will look at poems by Ruth Stone, Louise Glück, Rumi and Goethe. We will appreciate poetry’s unutterable as a way to expand, and make more strange, the self—until the self might very well disappear.