Capturing Madness: Poetry as Broken Music vs. Music About Brokenness (Zoom)

Doomed to be poets in an increasingly nonsensical world, it’s time we question the role of legibility in our poems. What do we lose when we write neat, lucid poems about incomprehensible experiences such as mental illness or war? How do we capture the authenticity and energy of these subjects to create broken music and not just music about brokenness? In this 4-hour generative workshop, we will turn to Surrealist poets, feminist Korean poets in translation, Federico García Lorca, Bhanu Kapil, and others for answers. Then we will spend time writing while letting our own “inner chaos demons” speak.

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Bianca (Four Way Books, 2023) and Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including TIME, The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and the Best of the Net anthology. Eugenia serves as a Poetry Editor at The…