2023 Summer Workshops
This workshop is part of our 3rd Annual Poetry Festival.
Frost once said, “poems are about what you don’t mean as well as what you do mean.” In our brief time together I’d like to examine this idea by thinking about the concept of “bewilderment” and how it gets acted out in our poems—either through syntax, our access to the duende, leaps into the unconscious realms, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. Or, as Aristotle puts it, “The mind in the act of making a mistake. . .” We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our poems, or in the poems themselves, for these are the thresholds beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the map. Over the course of our week together we will attempt to push a little deeper into this shadow world.
The workshop will be generative, in the sense that we will deepen work we have already done, and so please come with 10-20 pages of work in progress, in various states of completion, from polished to rough sketches.
Biography
Nick Flynn’s most recent books include: This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). His memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film in 2012 starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.