How are we intimately connected with the spaces we inhabit? And how can poetry reveal our connections with the interiors we dwell in? Using Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 book The Poetics of Space as a scaffolding from which to conceive of new written work, this five-week, online workshop will ask students to examine the qualities and resonances of the nooks where text, memory and visualization converge. Through classes combining elements of seminar, lab and workshop, students will develop a series of written works created in conversation with texts, images and objects. Writers of all disciplines and abilities are invited to investigate corners, attics, holes and the space of the page—and discover together the ways in which such spaces are shaped through reverie and the poetic imagination. Class sessions will meet synchronously via Zoom, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
Workshop Details
Simone Kearney is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. She is the author of Days (Belladonna Press, 2020), My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) and In Threes, a limited-edition artist chapbook (Minute BOOKS, 2013). Other select publications include Brooklyn Rail, Pen Poetry Series, Lithub, Boston Review, Riot of Perfume, Jubilat and St. Ann’s Review. She has been artist-in-residence at Lighthouse Works, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and Ragdale, among others. She is a part-time faculty member at Parsons School for Design.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press and event series. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.