What Kind of Times Are These: Why Place and Poems Matter, Especially Now

[A stand-alone writing workshop designed to generate a single work or series of works]

In Adrienne Rich’s poem, “What Kinds of Times Are These,” her alluring and haunting words echo our present moment. She writes about two places: a “country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own way of making people disappear,” and a place within that place, “between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill,” a “dark mesh of the woods,” a “ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise.” In this workshop, we’ll discuss poems by Rich, Ross Gay, W. S. Merwin and others whose words have touched and motivated generations to preserve the inspiring world around us. We’ll talk about what poems and art can do, about hope and beauty, and through our own writing, we’ll recall places that have moved us to reverence. Ideally, your reflections during this workshop will become beginnings of your own poems you can take with you after we part.