BR’s Free Generative Poetry Hour with Luisa A. Igloria (2/28)!
Join poet and past contributor Luisa A. Igloria for a free and virtual generative poetry hour on 2/28, 5:00-6:00pm PT!
Register here!
We Carry, Are Carried
A one-hour generative writing (poetry) workshop
We live in a complex time marked by uncertainty, calamity, and war; grief and loss. We turn to the language of poetry in our attempts to understand the experience of sorrow and the unbearable, both personally and as part of a community. In poetry we look for vessels that might help us give words to–and carry–what feels impossible; and which, through our encounter and study of them, might carry us and our readers as well.
In this generative workshop, we’ll consider a small selection of work from poets who engage deep and difficult subjects and consider how they find the “vessels” to carry them. We’ll look at their vocabulary and shaping energies (including metaphor, syntax, voice, lineation, use of structure), to see how the transformation from “event” or inciting instance to poem is managed.
There will be some opportunity for brief sharing and exchange, and poets will carry with them a set of guided prompts for their own use after the workshop.
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry (Black Lawrence Press) for Caulbearer (2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), and 11 other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize, UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey selected her chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask as the 2018 recipient of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize. Luisa is lead editor, with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and Jeremy S. Hoffman, of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, 2023). She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program at Old Dominion University and also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships in 2021, to support a program of public poetry projects.
