Poetry Master Class: Seeing Things

Instructor: Marianne Boruch
Date: Saturday March 19
Time: 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Location: Marian University/Marian Hall #205
Cost: $57 nonmembers, $39 members, $33 student members/teacher members/senior members/military members

The 18th, early 19th century poet William Blake was pretty offhand about it eventually, those angels he saw in a tree when he was nine, and again at fourteen, the ones just standing around among the threshers in a field, and that chat he had with the angel who served as Michelangelo’s favorite model for figures in his frescos. Our goal in this workshop is more modest and earthbound: to see things, the odd, everyday stuff–the beloved particulars, I call them–and follow them, not one’s pre-digested and stubborn intention, into poems or short prose meditations on the page and in the air.

Which is to say, the work of our workshops will concern habits of attention, a “habit of art” as fiction writer Flannery O’Connor called it. Our eye will be on hard image and its wily, rewarding connection to more reflective, abstract elements in what we write or read, how image makes meaning through verve and precision and surprise. In addition, to aid and abet this seeing through, we’ll be doing a few “imagery workshops,” exercises to deepen our habits of observation and our patience as well, trusting those images to trigger whatever flashes and fevers–with any luck, some solace too. And we’ll do something with scissors to drum up even more trouble.

Blake also said “I can look into a knot of wood until it frightens me.” Do we want to go there too? Sure. Maybe. I hope.

Marianne Boruch’s eight poetry collections include Cadaver, Speak (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) and The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), a Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award winner. CCP will bring out her next collection–Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing–in early fall, 2016. She is also the author of two essay collections, In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (Michigan, 1993), and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011) about hitchhiking to California from the midwest in 1971. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, London Review of Books, American Poetry Review, The Nation and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as artist residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, at Yaddo and MacDowell, at Isle Royale, the most isolated national park in the US, and this past summer, at Alaska’s Denali National Park. Recently she was given a Glick Indiana Authors Award. Boruch was a Fulbright/Visiting Professor in 2012 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and she taught at the University of Maine at Farmington before setting up the MFA program in English and Creative Writing in 1987 at Purdue where she has received many teaching awards and continues to be on faculty. Since 1988, she has also taught in the low- residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.