Emerging poets from Jacqueline Trimble’s Montgomery Regional Workshop “The Self as Inspiration: Looking Inward to Explore the Larger World” share new work.
Much of the work of poets such as Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, and Sharon Olds seems rooted in the lives of the poets themselves. How do these poets and others use their own lives to say something about their larger context, about a truth that resonates with or connects to the lives of others? This generative workshop will mine the self as a source for writing poems about the world outside the self. We will examine the work of others and then, using prompts and exercises, take a closer look at our physical and geographical selves as source material, to arrive at some poetic observations about how we live. We will experiment with forms (epistolary, narrative, fractured lyric, etc.) and explore the self as inspiration, or as Richard Hugo might call it, the “triggering town”, moving beyond poetry that simply looks inward but that uses the inward glance to do more than describe the self.