Evento

Poetry as Painting, a Workshop with Poet Jayne Benjulian at the Word Barn

Join Poet Jayne Benjulian at the Word Barn on Sunday, October 23 from 2-5 pm for a Workshop called Poetry as Painting.

Details:
Where/When: The Word Barn, 3-hours (2-5 pm), Sun, Oct. 23
Cost: $90
Capacity: maximum 12 participants

Workshop Description:

Four painters look out the same window. A month later we look at their paintings and witness four different versions of realityor unreality: highly eccentric and singular interpretations of a landscape each saw or remembered. No two paintings are likely to be the same.

In its articulation of a singular writers voice and vision, poetry transforms experience in a way that is analogous to painting. Such an opinion is, of course, contrary to what some readers assume: that poetry is autobiography. Not so. Even in the work of so-called confessional poets (a term I discourage) like Sylvia Plath, art transforms experience into something out of the real. In fact, reading the Plath manuscripts in Smiths Neilsen Library, I was astonished at how much her revisions lift her work out of autobiography. What remains are highly crafted poems that use autobiographical fact as springboards, but what transpires in the work is something entirely different.

How does such transformation happen? How does a poem lift off from its autobiography? How does a poet transform the memory of an experience so that it achieves meaning for others? Well investigate and practice how such transformation differs for each poet, just as it does for each painter.

Please carry a poem or prose paragraph to the workshop (maximum one page, double-spaced).