This three-hour workshop explores writing strategies inspired by Dickinson's experiments in language. As Dickinson made poems out of her reading, we will investigate the possibilities for reading (and playing with) Dickinson's poems as a way of generating our own poems. The first hour will focus on an introduction to Dickinson's key practices followed by a consideration of work by contemporary poets who have used Dickinson as inspiration and source. We will discuss what it means to use another writer, and consider how Dickinson made use of authors. During the second and third hours, we will conduct our own experiments using Dickinson as source and guide. The workshop is not focused on imitating Dickinson or even writing about Dickinson but concentrates on engaging in parallel play with Dickinson. Participants will generate work through experimentation with the lexical, syntactic, and material practices of Dickinson. Participants will leave the workshop with rough drafts and new ideas for generating poems.

Eva Heisler's poems have been widely published in journals such as Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, The Indiana Review, The Nation, and Poetry Northwest. Honors include The Nation's "Discovery" Award, the Chelsea Award for Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America's Emily Dickinson Award. A Fulbright grant brought her to Iceland where she lived for nine years and wrote many of the poems in Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic, forthcoming from Kore Press. She currently lives in Germany where she teaches for the European Division of University of Maryland University College.

This event is sponsored by Kore Press in conjunction with The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. This event is also supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. Visit the Kore Press website for a schedule of all Emily Dickinson Big Read events taking place in Tucson this fall: http://www.korepress.org/bigread2011.htm