Lit Fest 2024

This seminar will focus on the way that certain early and usually intuitive decisions in writing a poem (grammatical voice, verb tense, tone, choice of form or structure) create specific invitations that guide and affect whatever will come next to the page. A haiku does different work than an elegy, even though both can embody profound emotion. A poem looking backward in time will carry a different set of possibilities than one looking into an imagined future. After exploring a set of model poems for some sense of how this happens, participants will write (perhaps more than once, depending on time) to an invitation lattice they've consciously chosen. Note: Each participant should bring one contemporary poem (by someone else; not over a page in length at most) they are currently thrilled by.