This workshop is now full. If you are interested in adding your name to the waiting list, please do so here.

 

This is an online workshop that takes place via Zoom and is free to employees and volunteers of Houston Methodist and HM physicians in private practice.

Inprint Poetry Workshop: In My Feels—Reveling in Sensory Language

Offered by the Center for Performing Arts Medicine at Houston Methodist and presented by Inprint, Houston’s premier literary arts nonprofit organization

The poet Carl Phillips often describes poetry as a “transformation of experience.” In this six-session online class, we’ll explore ways to transform our experiences by turning our poetic attention to language of the sensory world, with the goal of enlivening our lines and vivifying our verse. Using a selection of readings as inspiration, and drawing on various exercises designed to push us outside of our existing vocabularies, we’ll learn how to dilate moments of sensory intensity into insight for our poems. We’ll spend one week on each: sight, hearing, scent, taste, touch, and our so-called sixth sense of intuition. At the conclusion of our first class meeting, during which we’ll work with sight––a common, and sometimes overused family of imagery––participants will select one of the remaining senses to investigate more deeply in their own writing. We will then take two weeks to work reflectively on our own with light reading assignments and related writing exercises for practice. Then we’ll meet weekly for the remainder of the course, sharing what we’ve all discovered, with prompts and in-class exercises to establish tools and inspirations to aid us in our writing lives and walk away with new poems.