Encountering Place: Composing Site-Specific Poetry

How can a poem reflect a place and its complex past, present, and futures - as opposed to covering them over? What is the syntax of a place, its diction, and its forms? What do I know in a specific place that I can know nowhere else, and what does this place know that I do not know myself? In this workshop, we will engage in the poetry of place—how attention and attachment, as well as eco- and documentary poetics, can be used to generate civically engaged art. We will focus on engaging with questions and tools which will hopefully outfit attendees with frameworks to compose ongoing poems of place in their communities.