Early in the “language experiment” he called LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman enjoins his readers to open the locked doors and unscrew the doors from the jambs. In Whitman’s spirit, this workshop is designed to invite poets to experiment by generating new work and developing drafts in various directions. We’ll read and talk about exemplary contemporary poems. The goal is to work and work, diving deep into what we don’t know how to do yet, seeking insight, complexity and strategies that might lead us, like new roads, to new places. We’ll also devote some of our sessions to discussing work by participants, either poems in progress or fresh out of your notebook.
MARK DOTY is the author of the nine collections of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W.W. Norton, 2015) and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award. His collection, My Alexandria (HarperCollins, 1993), won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His other awards include a 1994 Whiting Award, a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and three Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Men’s Poetry for Atlantis (1995), Source (2001), and Fire to Fire (2008). Doty also has published three memoirs. His most recent memoir, Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2005), received the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography as well as the 2008 Stonewall Book Award. Doty wrote the book-length essay, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. In 2012, Doty served as guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribners, 2012). He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Writers House at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2018, he was awarded The Robert Creeley Award.
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