Registration required:
Online, 5 sessions / $325
Register
For inspiration and innovation, poets often turn to the other arts: painting, sculpture, music, theater. “Ekphrasis“—the tradition of poetry responding to works of visual art—is as ancient as poetry itself. What can the theories and techniques of visual art teach us about making poems? How can poems about paintings, with their immediacy and sensuality, offer interpretations of art's eternal tensions: reality and artifice, grandeur and daliness, sequence and simultaneity? In this crash course reading group, we'll read five contemporary poets who explore visual art and ask questions about representation, identity, power, and time. Students will be given take-home prompts based on the assigned texts to spur writing.
Crash Course seminars require outside reading of assigned texts. After enrolling, students should plan to access (purchase or borrow) the following texts in time to read them ahead of class sessions. Enrolled students should join the first session having read Erosion.
Reading List:
- Erosion, Jorie Graham (1983). Buy: [Print]
- To Repel Ghosts: The Remix, Kevin Young (2005). Buy: [Print]
- Thrall, Natasha Trethewey (2012). Buy: [Print]
- Chord, Rick Barot (2015). Buy: [Print]
- Information Desk: An Epic, Robyn Schiff (2023). Buy: [Print] [Digital]
Class modality: Online synchronous (real-time attendance required)
Class size: 8 to 25 students
Required textbooks: Yes
Recorded: Yes
In-class & prompted writing: Yes
Workshopping & feedback: No
Richie Hofmann is the author of two books of poems, A Hundred Lovers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022) and Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015). His poetry has appeared recently in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, and he has been honored with the Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships. He teaches at the University of Chicago.
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available to cover the enrollment costs of Poetry Society classes. To receive and fill out a scholarship survey, email parker@poetrysociety.org.
