What keeps you up late at night and enters your dreams? How can such hauntings be unfurled and made comprehensible and even beautiful? This five-week online workshop will explore the how and why of insomnia and restlessness, the twilight hours of limited train service and waiting forever on a platform, the missed connections almost made, the sudden confessions that pour out in late-night calls. We’ll read and discuss poets like Tracy K. Smith, Ai, Rae Armantrout, Richard Siken and more. Our objective will be to explore different aspects of the night, from the poetry of polar nights and aurora borealis to dreamscapes in which a lucid, awakened you finds poetic agency. Class sessions will meet synchronously via Zoom, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
Workshop Details
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo and Queens Council on the Arts. Her work appears in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Tin House, Guernica, and Electric Literature, among other places. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC. In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay “My Judaism is a Wild Unplace” for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020). In January 2023, she performed at Carnegie Hall on International Holocaust Memorial Day as part of “We Are Here: Songs From the Holocaust.”