Please note that this is an online workshop conducted via Zoom. Participants will be provided information on how to join the online sessions.

While the pandemic has made daily life strange, warping what we deemed as ordinary into the bizarre, poets have long met the challenge of describing the uncanny and fantastic in the everyday. In this poetry workshop, we will examine the way contemporary poets use the power of imagery and metaphor to examine reality’s façade, and how they juxtapose the familiar with the mystifying in their examinations of pop-culture, virtual reality, war, and violence. As writers, we’ll be challenged to scratch beneath the surface of our own daily experiences, those that are personal as well as in our interactions with community and the social fabric. Through writing exercises, workshop, and study of poets Ai, Diane Seuss, Ilya Kaminsky, Natalie Diaz, Natalie Scenters-Zapico and Franny Choi, among others, we’ll craft creative responses to what lies beneath the superficial layers of our lives—revealing the nightmare, the absurd, the ecstatic.