Casa Libre Class Registration Form | Past Programs | Directions to Casa Libre

Poetry in the Grocery List
a poetry workshop w/ Stephanie Balzer & Sommer Browning

Friday-Sunday
May 1-3, 2015
Friday 6-9pm
Saturday 10-5pm
Sunday 9-12pm

Cost: $100
$50 scholarships available
To register or inquire about scholarships please email casakeepers@casalibre.org

cost of workshop

Full Price $100.00 USD w/ awarded scholarship $50.00 USD

Stephanie Balzer and Sommer Browning will be reading their work at Casa Libre's Fundraiser "From Farm to Poem." For more information...

Commonplace language and situations are often surreal, hilarious, philosophical and poetic. To-do lists, meeting minutes, voicemails, recipes, court proceedings, tweets, jokes – there is poetry everywhere, and poetic movements from” found” to “flarf” have revealed the ordinary to be something else. What’s next? In this workshop we will explore some ways poets have used “unpoetic” sources for their work, we’ll be inspired by what we used to consider banal, and we’ll find beauty in the grocery list, transformation in the obituary. We’ll investigate tone, subject matter, identity, emotion, and the definitions of “interesting” and “enough.” The workshop will incorporate philosophy, film, fine art and poetry to shift our ideas about the poetic and inspire new work. Come to class with an open mind and a willingness to read, discuss, share, and write. Be prepared to discover poetry in the most unusual of places. 

Teacher Bios:

Stephanie Balzer earned her MFA from the University of Arizona in 2004. Her chapbooks include Revenant (Kore Press), faster, faster (CUE Editions), and WED JAN 30 12:58:10 2013 — THU DEC 20 14:16:36 2012: An Elegy (Flying Guillotine Press.) Her poems have also appeared in The Destroyer, Coconut Poetry, MidAmerican Review, and CUE, A Journal of Prose Poetry.

 

 

Sommer Browning writes poems, draws comics, and tells jokes. She is the author of two collections published by Birds, LLC, Backup Singers (2014) and Either Way I'm Celebrating (2011), as well as three chapbooks, most recently The Bowling (Greying Ghost, 2010) with Brandon Shimoda. Her poems and drawings have appeared in The New York Quarterly, Typo, Octopus, past simple, Free Verse, The Stranger, and other places.