Begin Anywhere: A Generative Writing Workshop with Maya Pindyck (via Zoom)

In this course, we will play with different ways of entering a poem, focusing on forms of poetry that mobilize external sources to create something new: erasures, centos, and ekphrastic writing. Chance will be our guide. We will let go of “likes” and “dislikes” when it comes to sources, and practice making poetry out of anything. We will discuss both published examples and peer exercises in engaging, vigorous, and attentive ways. Rooted in generative exercises and a spirit of play, this workshop will help you to engage existing forms of cultural production– written and visual– through poetry, and to find poetic possibilities in any source. No previous experience with poetry required.

Maya Pindyck is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her most recent poetry collection, Impossible Belonging, won the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry (Anhinga Press, 2023). She is also author of Emoticoncert (Four Way Books, 2016) and Friend Among Stones, winner of the Many Voices Project Award (New Rivers Press, 2009), and co-author of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers: Reorienting Classroom Literacy Practices (Bloomsbury, 2022). Her work has earned her a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, and grants from the Historic House Trust of New York City and Abortion Conversation Projects. She lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design.