USING THE NEWS: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Martha Collins (Zoom)

How do we respond, as poets, to the increasingly disturbing news of our day, as well as the history that brought us to where we are? This four-hour workshop will begin with an hour-long discussion of poems that artfully respond to contemporary issues (politics, race, immigration, climate change, war) and/or to relevant historical events and situations that continue to impact the present. A major focus will be on using and transforming news accounts, factual information, and historical documents into poems. The last three hours of the workshop will be spent in careful discussion of your own

poems (which may or may not relate to the topic described above: your choice).

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her tenth, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto…