I do not believe in creation but in discovery, and I don’t believe in the seated artist but in the one who is walking the road.
—Federico Garcia Lorca
In the dictionary, “to bewilder” means “to cause to lose one’s sense of where one is.” In this six-week workshop, we’ll use our wills and wiles to disorient our senses, dislocating ourselves from the known and treaded world around us. We’ll engage with poems and ideas—our own and others’—that allow us to tune in to what lies in the gentle darkness spilling off the beaten path. By disregarding accepted notions of craft and creation, we’ll explore and expand the internal and external processes that guide us on the page. Participants will be encouraged to burn their maps, toss away their compasses and be prepared to find new access points into the divinities and truths that they seek. Using stream-of-consciousness writing prompts, discarded poems, image journals and journals that track daily bewilderments, we’ll attempt to discover in our writing—to quote Elliott Smith—a beautiful place to get lost. Foundational texts for the workshop will include but not be limited to works by Fanny Howe, Saeed Jones, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kaveh Akbar, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Mahmoud Darwish, Natalie Diaz, John Murillo, Shira Erlichman and Aracelis Girmay. Note: sharing journals will be required in this workshop.
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
Anthony Thomas Lombardi is a Best of the Net– and Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer and educator. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered reading series partnered with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that raises funds for transnational relief efforts, bail funds and mutual aid organizations, and he serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship, he has taught at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Polyphony Lit’s Summer Editorial Apprenticeship Program and for community programming throughout New York City. His work has appeared or will soon in the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, North American Review and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two cats.