Truth: A Poet’s Raw Material: A Poetry Intensive with Kathy Fagan (Zoom)

Dickinson famously wrote: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And Audre Lorde: “Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.” Our generative session today is based on the premise that poets, in telling their truth, weave narrative and lyric, the personal and political, autobiography and history in their poems and hybrid works. We will look specifically at work based on three, often overlapping, truth-telling categories: researching archival materials, the poetry of witness or “documentary” poetics, and the mining of deeply personal experience. Examples provided include poems or portions of poems by Layli Long Soldier, Carolyn Forche, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and C.D. Wright, among others.

We will read aloud and discuss these poems through the double lenses of “truth” and craft. Based on a study of these strategies, we might experiment with braiding techniques, memory exercises, and other narrative strategies for our…