Voice partakes of a dynamic conversation across history, languages, cultures, and traditions. Yet few notions in poetry today prove as lively, elusive, and contested as voice. Whether we think of voice as a metaphor for identity and personal style, or as the root material of poems, or as a barometer of moral and cultural authority, we rarely consider how these aspects come together in a single poem. There is nothing neutral or transparent about the voice of any poem. What do our voices say about us, and how much license should we claim in shaping them? In this workshop we will write new poems that explore these exciting and contrary facets of voice.
GREGORY PARDLO’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays forthcoming from Knopf. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review.
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