Poetry Saturday

“I wish I had your imagination!” How often have we found ourselves saying those words, or wishing silently for more of the imagination’s transformative power in our daily lives? It isn’t that we want to live on Mars, necessarily, what we wish is for something we had as children to be returned to us: that sense of the world’s mystery which let us move through ‘normal life’ with a Martian’s wonder. We don’t want to get away from the real, it’s just that the real, as Paul Valery noted, is expressed most immanently through the absurd. Truth, as we know, is much stranger than fiction, and--strangers here ourselves--we want some way to greet the truth on equal terms. Perhaps the actual can only surprise or be surprised where pleasure weakens our will to force fact into the box of a previous understanding? We all know the good of a fresh angle on things--and what better way than poetry to, as Dickinson put it, tell the truth but tell it slant? Charmed by music, entranced by images, giddy with flights of rhetoric and reference, poetry opens a green world: a place to encounter the truth in all its wonder and restore our capacity to both astonish and be astonished as writers. This workshop’s goal is to wake and encourage the imagination, to support its necessary digressions and odd nominations, to help the poet trust the quirkier, less logical or linear, moves of her or his own mind and make the writing more wonderful--literally! In the morning session writers will be given exercises which work to activate memory and attention as well as imagination, to help shake the fetters of our mental habits, loosening the hold of the past and bringing us face to face with future possibilities. In the afternoon a workshop on revision will focus on the following:

Changing the angle of vision and other ways to see freshly
Recognizing the difference between obscurity and mystery
Locating, building on, and increasing the poem’s imaginative energy

Bring to this session: an old family snapshot--from your childhood if possible--and 1-2 longish or 3-4 very short poems you want to revise, are struggling with, or feel could benefit from being more imaginative. Make sure you bring enough copies for everyone! Bring a notebook and pen(s) as well, for in-class writing.

Email: Laura.Mullen@Colostate.edu
Enrollment Limit: 18