Milosz famously said that the “purpose of poetry is to remind us/how difficult it is to remain just one person.”
Often, we use the flexible space between a poet and their speaker to do this. However, this space doesn’t need to remain fixed in a poem, and in fact can often be expanded and contracted to surprise, beguile, and thrill the reader.
In this workshop, we’ll read poems that play with this distance, and practice writing our own that put on a mask so it can slip a little.
PRESENTERConor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press) and The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (forthcoming from Diode Editions). He is also the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center). His work has earned fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Frost Place, Inprint, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has appeared in places like BOMB, jubilat, New England Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Sixth Finch, among others. He lives in Ohio.
Details: The Shifty Speaker takes place Wednesday, July 14 and Wednesday, July 21 from 12-1pm remotely through Zoom.
