This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Eating in Your Poems: Writing About Food
Peeled pomelos, two eggs, sunny-side up, sesame oil, a bowl of rice. All these images conjure different emotions and memories for each person. Food is often used as a metaphor and vehicle for love and care—an aspect we will be encountering in this workshop. But we will also be exploring how food can illuminate doubt and scarcity. How do we write food into our poems? How do we ground readers into the body with food? How do we make readers hungry for poems? How do we eat in our poems? These are the questions we will be exploring.
In this class, we will examine the relationship between food and our bodies, our emotions, and our world and how to thread that connection in poetry through various forms and techniques. Poets we will discuss include Jane Wong, Nikki Giovanni, Kemi Alabi, Chen Chen, Jose Olivarez, Rudy Francisco, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and many others*. We will work through craft topics on form such as the usage of the prose poem, ellipses, litany, and questions. Through these discussions, we will also generate poetry based on specific prompts and share our work with each other.
*Content warning: The readings for this class contain some poems with explicit mentions of disordered eating
