Movement is a poet’s dialect: we pace the room of each stanza, we shuttle our readers across & down the page, & we reach inside them & rearrange the furniture. Even our metaphors have a vehicle to transport the tenor to & from. Isn’t revision, too, a kind of effort to get somewhere?

In establishing her traveling scholarship, Amy Lowell emphasized the importance of travel on a poet’s life. But seeing new landscapes hardly requires a boarding pass abroad. What makes you a local except that you understand how here is so thoroughly not there? Our personal geographies can be just as—if not far more—intricate & worthy of exploration as the topography of a country other than your own.

Using the poetry of place—pastoral, urban, corporeal, & emotional—this one-week intensive workshop will explore themes of exodus, exile, & pilgrimage. We will consider more closely what it means for a poet to be “at home” in their work vs “at home” in the world & whether the two can be rectified on the page. Can a poem be in situ? Will our poems suffer gentrification like our neighborhoods? Do all roads lead home? Is home a place you can touch—the body, the earth—or a feeling like hiraeth, which indicates “home” may never have existed at all?

Daily prompts will ask you to engage in archiving, mythmaking, tributes, & radical genealogy. Through a series of exercises & experiments, we will write poems that respond to the sharp edges & soft yields of space-making as a craft. Together, we will use place as a seismograph with which to gauge the sociohistorical implications of poetry on one’s ability to experience stillness in a world relentlessly in motion.

In addition to submitting work, you will be expected to comment on 1-2 of your classmates’ experiments daily. At the end of the course, I will conduct one-on-one conversations with each student via email to discuss further revisions and how to move forward.