10 am - 11:30 am
3 Day Workshop
Unhinge, Resist, Transform: Poetry as Social Justice Art with Diane Raptosh
June 27-29, 10 am – 11:30 am
M $60/ NM $75, limit 12
This program will consider poetry’s role in relation to the larger social, cultural, and political issues of our time. Sounds serious! Yet in doing so, we’ll be paying attention largely to the playful elements of language: found phrases, lines from books, and series of words gathered from such places as the news media, the blogosphere, even from Facebook and Twitter. We will try our hand at collage poems transcribing an important news announcement, such as the BP Oil Spill, the Supreme Court’s Decision on Obama’s Affordable (Health) Care Act, and other contemporary events. We may write narrative poems composed entirely of misheard newsbytes, menu items, song lyrics, and overheard conversations. We will revise (and hence revitalize) some clichés; we’ll rewrite horoscopes. We will write poems made up entirely of things we’d like to say, but never would, to a lover, sibling, teacher, mayor, president, or corporate CEO. We will write “list poems” composed entirely of news headlines; we will “walk on colors”: stroll around the neighborhood paying as much attention as possible to one color, and then another. In short, we will mine the world for data that we are able to use to create new possibilities for the word and for the world in this three-day workshop based in serious play.
Enroll Online
MORE ABOUT DIANE RAPTOSH
I am the daughter of a first-generation Sicilian-American mother possessed of countless eccentricities, boundless native intelligence, and an utterly singular way of seeing the world. It is in no small part due to her that I became a poet. She has been a source of strange and magnificent sayings, swatches of wisdom, and offbeat recommendations my whole life. In addition to a host of poets across place and time, she has given me the courage not merely to write poetry but to produce the kind of art that encourages conscience and seeks to transform. To this end, as poet and as simply someone alive, I keep close to me this sentiment from South African poet Dennis Brutus, who, when asked about the role of the poet in the world, said the following: “I believe that the poet—as a poet—has no obligation to be committed. What I’m saying is that I think everybody ought to be committed and the poet is just one of the many ‘everybodies.”
