We will explore Keats’s notion of Negative Capability as it relates to our capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” in our poems. We will engage in conversation, reading, generative exercises, and the consideration of your poems, their themes, thesis, and emotional core, with a goal of moving toward work that could be written by no one but you. Defying the easy-out of closure in poems, we will practice and discuss how memory work, music, and imagination can lead us into our most charged enigmatic spaces, while form and narrative coherence can provide focus, support, and artfulness to our poems. We will spend our time together finding our way to the crossroads between lyric intensity and formal compression, negative and positive capability.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021). Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press 2010) received the Juniper Prize. Seuss was educated at Kalamazoo College and Western Michigan University, with a BA in Creative Writing and an MSW. She has taught at Kalamazoo College, Colorado College, the University of Michigan, Washington University in St. Louis, and for the Stonecoast MFA program. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the 2021 John Updike Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
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