From the Book of Revelation to “The Waste Land,” poetry has continually engaged with that perennial, bad bedtime story: the End of the World. But what do we mean by “the end” and “the world”? Aren’t there many endings and many worlds? Are we still in thrall to Western notions of progress and regress? Are we unable to embrace and explore a poetics of cycles, deaths and rebirths, ends which point to beginnings? How does poetry respond to the crisis of “The End”? In this five-week, generative workshop, we’ll read poets and poems who form a wide range of responses to the fantasies (and realities) of armageddon that populate our imagination. Prompts will point toward writing poems that find new ways to process the dread, the trauma and the possibilities inherent in musing upon “the end of the world.”
We strongly encourage all in-person workshop participants to wear masks. Workshop participants may be required to wear masks as an accessibility accommodation for other participants or the instructor.
Workshop Details
Gregory Crosby is the author of Said No One Ever, Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion and the chapbooks Spooky Action at a Distance and The Book of Thirteen. For more than a decade he worked as an art critic, columnist and cultural commentator in Las Vegas, where he served as a poetry consultant for the Cultural Affairs Division. He was awarded a Nevada Arts Council Fellowship in Literary Arts and holds an MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York, where he won the 2006 Marie Ponsot Poetry Prize. From 2010 to 2014 he cocurated the Earshot reading series and from 2011 to 2015 he coedited the online poetry journal Lyre Lyre. Currently he is the poetry editor for Bowery Gothic and an adjunct assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he teaches creative writing.