Hybrid Poetry as Witness and Reclamation Workshop (An Online Workshop w/Shira Dentz)

Sunday March 13 & Sunday March 20, 3PM–5:30PM Eastern Time

(2PM–4:30PM Central Time, 1PM–3:30PM Mountain Time, Noon-2:30PM Pacific Time)

$125

Do the limits of one’s world equal the limits of one’s language (as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed)? What motivates a writer to push genre boundaries and cross-pollinate poetry with other genres and/or media?

Traumatic events often dismantle language and are identified as an absence, or that which hasn’t come to be understood. How might a traumatized individual bear witness to the experience and testify about an event that has yet to be understood? In this workshop, we'll view language as a medium with texture, sound, and visuality in addition to denotations and connotations. We’ll also explore the practice of imagetext as “postsecret,” rendering what was secret, and the reclamation of traumatic experiences and identity. Our focus will be on hybrid poetry, including prose poems, process-writing, and poetry that crosses into the boundaries of visual art and other media. 

You’ll be given prompts to launch you into experiments with writing hybrid texts, and we’ll discuss your work as well as hybrid works that are also innovative language-acts of witness by authors such as Layli Long Soldier, giovanni singleton, Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Mai Der Vong, Matthew Cooperman & Aby Kaupang, Brenda Hillman, Julia Madsen, and Evie Shockley. In addition to honing our attention to each of our inner and outer worlds through language, this workshop will often emphasize form in relation to the poetic line. 

Shira Dentz is the author of five books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK, 2020), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Prize 2021, and two chapbooks. Her writing appears in many venues including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Lana Turner, Brooklyn Rail, Plume, Denver Quarterly, Idaho Review, Colorado Review, Black Warrior Review, Apartment, New American Writing, Poets.org, and NPR, and she’s a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and Poetry Society of America. More at www.shiradentz.com

Two partial need-based scholarships are available (please email requests to: [email protected])

This Silo Series workshop is made possible in part by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts