Instructor: Manuel Iris
Sessions: 5 sessions, each 2 hours long
Cohort I: October 1st - October 29th
Zoom meeting on Wednesday evenings, 6:30-8:30pm
Registration pricing below. The Patron Ticket best honors poet and his time instructing; also offering — in shorter supply — Supporter & Equity Tickets for more accessible registration options.
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Patron Ticket: $250
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Supporter Ticket: $200
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Equity Ticket: $125
After purchasing your ticket, you will receive an email receipt with a link to register for your cohort's Zoom sessions.
We believe in equity and accessibility for all who need it. If you have additional questions, please reach out to [email protected].
The aim of this workshop is to give participants the opportunity to begin building their own personal poetics. By the end of the five sessions, participants will be able to respond in a personal and intimate way to a fundamental question: What is my personal poetics? In other words, what is poetry to me, and how is that reflected in the way I write?
Of course, the answer is not fixed. These certainties will evolve over the course of an artist's life. However, it is important never to abandon the question. This workshop is not solely focused on helping the participants to further their craft and writing technique, but with something even more foundational: articulating their reasons for writing and, most importantly, constructing their identity as poets or artists of any kind—within both the contemporary world and the artistic tradition to which they belong.
To achieve this, the workshop will expose participants to various personal poetics, presented in essay form by different authors (Wislawa Szymborska, Joseph Brodsky, Eugenio Montejo, Mary Oliver, Alice Notley), whom participants will also read as poets. This will allow the class to examine the consistency between their stated poetics and the one expressed in their poems.
Each session of the workshop will have two parts. In the first, the class will discuss a notion of poetics. In the second half, the class will engage in creative writing exercises based on prompts Manuel Iris will provide. At the end of each session, participants will read their poems and speak about their personal poetics.
After the five sessions are completed, participants may not yet have all the answers, but they will clearly have identified their essential questions—questions that will help them approach the poetic craft as a way of inhabiting the world and understanding reality.
Manuel Iris's bio:
Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born, bilingual American poet who has served as Poet Laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio, Writer-in-Residence at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, and Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More University. In 2021, he was named a member of the prestigious National System of Art Creators of Mexico. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, published in several countries. He has received national and international recognition for his poetic work, including the Ambroggio poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets for his forthcoming book The whole earth is a garden of monsters/Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos. In 2023, the Autonomous University of Chiapas in Mexico released Translator of Silence: Critical Approaches to Manuel Iris’s Literary Works [Traductor del silencio: acercamientos críticos a la obra de Manuel Iris], a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews by 23 authors exploring his poetry.