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Inprint Intensive Workshops, Writers Workshops,

Poetry Intensive 2020-115

Course #2020-115
Saturday April 18 9:00 am–1:00 pm & Sunday, April 19, 9 am - 1 pm
Cost: $180 Instructor: Robin Davidson
This workshop has been cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Where

Inprint House
1520 W Main St
Houston, TX 77006 United States
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Writing Our Truth: Memory, History, and Lyric Form

In her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, Jane Hirschfield writes, “Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision.” Literary texts offer the opportunity for such “truing,” acute seeing, in terms of both personal and social transformation. In this weekend intensive, we will explore memory (our interior lives) and history (the intersection of the personal with one’s historical moment) as these inform a writer’s vision. We will begin exploring selected poems, their truths, by considering, first, writerly strategies that engage personal memory, and second, readings that engage history and the notion of bearing witness with regard to home, exile, lament, refuge, and gratitude. Then we’ll shift to a discussion of lyric form and hybridity—the use of poem, story, reportage, song, visual image, and typography, as elements of collage. Through in-class writing exercises and discussion, we will begin to shape our own literary projects as mosaics evocative of the postmodern era in which we live and write.

About the instructor

ROBIN DAVIDSON is the author of two chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and the collection Luminous Other, awarded the Ashland Poetry Press’s 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Recipient of a Fulbright professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and an NEA translation fellowship, she is co-translator with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska of Ewa Lipska’s poems from the Polish—The New Century (Northwestern UP, 2009). Davidson served as 2015-2017 Houston Poet Laureate and edited the citywide 2018 anthology, Houston’s Favorite Poems. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019. She teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English at the UH-Downtown.

By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration  policies. Remember to sign up for the waiting list if the workshop you would like to take is full. To see the full Winter/Spring 2020 workshop schedule click here.