Diving Deep: A Writing Intensive on Poetry’s Ability to Reveal and Heal with Subhaga Crystal Bacon (Zoom)

This generative workshop will engage participants in a six week intensive writing poems that reveal hidden truths about ourselves. While poetry is not therapy, it can offer healing by providing a framework for uncovering past trauma, or painful experiences, and reframing them in ways that serve our self-knowing. About form, Philip Metres has said that it can “open a space for us to surprise ourselves into revelation.” And Muriel Rukeyser has said there are “two kinds of reaching in poetry, one based on the document, the evidence itself; the other kind informed by the unverifiable fact, as in sex, dream, the parts of life in which we dive deep.” All poetry is language channeled through the figurative, imagery and metaphor. We’ll read and discuss sample poems that make exceptional use of the figurative as well as forms and docupoetics to illustrate the ways their writers have revealed, and by extension,…