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The poem as document: writing place through accumulation
with Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung will be reading her work for the Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre on July 17 more info...

 

Thursday, July 18
5 to 7 pm
Cost: $10 and a donation of a non-perishable food item to donate to Open Inn
To register please email casakeepers@casalibre.org

The places we live, the selves who we are, and the writing we make can no longer be understood as singular. Other stories, other perspectives run just below the surface or thread themselves through it. A place understood in this way becomes stratifed—layered with time and thebodies and objects it contains—rather than horizontal. Its depth indicates its complexity and itscontradictions: all this in one space!

This workshop asks how we might write poems that look at place with an eye toward this
multiplicity of presences. How can we write about where we are or where we have been, while
thinking about who else has been there (or is there), what has happened there, and what has moved through that space? We'll use a very short essay (“Tourism and Promised Lands”) by Adrienne Rich, a quotation (below) from the teaching of W.G. Sebald, and an excerpt from Carolyn Forché's long poem “On Earth” to think about the poem as an open, complex, and sometimes self-contradicting document of what is or has been in a place. The workshop will include discussion of the pieces of writing provided, as well as a number of exercises through which we'll question our ideas of place and the places we think about.

Please bring objects with you that recall a place or places you have been that you would like
to write about—as many as you like. This could include plant material, photographs, soil samples,
rocks or other specimens, souvenirs, quotations from others' writing or your own....

Sebald:
How do you surpass horror once you’ve reached a certain level? How do you stop it
appearing gratuitous? [Sebald] answered himself. Let me get this right. You [...]
might think that because you are writing fction you needn’t be overly concerned to get the
facts straight. But aesthetics is not a value-free area. And you must be particularly careful
if your subject concerns horrifc events. You must stick absolutely to the facts. The most
plausible, perhaps even the only, approach is the documentary one. I would say that writing
about an appalling state of affairs is incommensurable with traditional aesthetics.

 

Teacher Bio

Éireann Lorsung's two collections, both from Milkweed, are Music For Landing Planes By, 2007 and Her Book, August 2013. Her poems recently appear in or are forthcoming from Beloit Poetry Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Burnside Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, and Women's Studies Quarterly; prose appears or is forthcoming in Two Serious Ladies, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, and Bluestem. She lives in Belgium, where she edits 111O (111oh.com) and co-runs MIEL, a micropress (miel-books.com).