The Winter Wheat Festival of Writing is just around the corner! We have dozens of great and intriguing panels for you to attend, from poetry, fiction, nonfiction, publishing, techniques, and new ideas for your own writing.
Are you a poet or just love poetry? Take a look at these 5 panels that are poetry-focused:
“The Poetic Image as Communication,” with Jacob Hall
We will have a discussion on the utility of the poetic image as a means of communicating theme, narrative, sense, and emotion within a poem. This will involve exploring hypothetical uses of image as a means of communication, as well as examining works from a range of poets who utilize the communicative image within their poems. Finally, we will have a workshop in which attendees will work to craft their own poetic images intended to communicate with a reader.
Jacob Hall is a second-year MFA candidate in creative writing at BGSU. He serves as the assistant poetry editor for Mid-American Review.
(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A2 when you register!)
“Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm.” with Abigail Cloud
An old Sesame Street music scene begins with those words and continues on to study objects that make distinct rhythms. Why is rhythm so often hard for us to grasp as adults? In this workshop we’ll experiment with ways to charge our poetic language rhythmically, whether or not we’re following a meter.
Abigail Cloud teaches creative writing, editing, and publishing at BGSU and serves as editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review. Her book, Sylph (Pleiades, 2015), won the 2014 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize.
(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B2 when you register!)
“The Contemporary Ode,” with Katrina Vandenberg
Poet C.D. Wright said that the ode is “one of the few literary tendencies left on the lot that admits wonder and presumes a future.” In this hands-on workshop, we’ll examine what it means in 2016 to celebrate and wonder, noting strategies of contemporary ode writers like Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, and others, then put those strategies to work on the page as we create new work.
Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two books of poems, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (2012) and Atlas(2004), both from Milkweed. She teaches in The Creative Writing Program at Hamline University, and serves as poetry editor for Water~Stone Review. She is co-attending the FUSE conference as founding editor of the undergraduate magazine Runestone. www.katrinavandenberg.com
(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C8 when you register!)
“Write Yourself as You Are, with Purpose: Feminism & Poetry,” with Roseanna Boswell
Adrienne Rich wrote, “the moment a feeling enters a body, is political,” suggesting that the intersection of feelings and bodies is political, which means that poetry is political. Helene Cixous demanded: “write yourself. Your body must be heard,” because we must meet ourselves in our own words, our own bodies, and not settle for someone else’s perspective. Writing poetry is not just political for the listener or reader then, but also for the writer who is claiming their voice as a valuable one. In this workshop we will discuss using poetry as a means of accessing identity, and attendees will be given the chance to draft poems with this goal in mind.
Roseanna Boswell is a poetry MFA candidate at BGSU in Ohio. Her writing focuses primarily on the voices of girls and women, and seeks to explore and interrogate traditional notions of femininity as related to gender, sexuality, and body image.
(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D2 when you register!)
“(Re)combining Poetic Sensibilities,” with Brandon North
Centos, erasures, Google sculpting, and other recombinant methods of composing poems are helpful with the metacognition of one’s poetic sensibilities. For both the student and experienced writer, composing with gathered materials is useful in reorienting, honing, or expanding one’s sense of what is possible in a piece of writing. In this workshop, we will try out several methods of composing found poetry with an eye toward critically investigating why we might use, choose, and/or combine words/phrases/sentences in crafting poems. After writing through each method, we will discuss the aesthetics we find ourselves leaning toward, both personally and collectively.
Brandon North is a second-year poet in the NEOMFA program and holds an MA in literature from Wright State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in decomP and UnLost. He redirects energy at centeringspirals.blogspot.com.
(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 1:30-2:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E6 when you register!)
Check out these and other great panels on our website: