In this six-week, in-person workshop, dream journals will be our foundation, which will be kept daily in order to track and trace our subconscious minds. Students will also keep image journals, collecting things that catch their eyes as well as lines and ideas they find themselves drawn to in their day-to-day lives, which will work in tandem with dream journals as structures to guide their poems. All poems for the workshop will be written in the vein of found poetry: students will swap their journals and create poems using only the texts found in other students’ journals. (Note: sharing journals will be required in this workshop.) Students will also contribute lines each week to a communal word bank, from which everyone can draw, using whichever lines they wish. The final and most important part of the workshop’s foundation will be a weekly sharing time, when we’ll share, discuss, argue, agree, laugh, love and engage with whatever a student wishes to share—a poem, a story from their week, a profound experience, recipes for cookies, songs that make them cry—anything. Through this fostering of intimacy and vulnerability, poems and community grow.
Essays by June Jordan will be cornerstones of the workshop, which we’ll read weekly. We’ll also read, engage with and respond to works by Aracelis Girmay, Wendy Trevino, Karisma Price, John Murillo, Nate Marshall, Nazim Hikmet, Camille Dungy, Mahmoud Darwish, Noor Hindi, Ross Gay and Hanif Abdurraqib, among others. (Texts subject to change.) Class sessions will meet at 144 Montague St, and assignments, poems and critiques will be shared via Wet Ink.
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 Pushcart-nominated poet, editor, organizer, activist 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 for the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Polyphony Lit’s Summer Editorial Apprenticeship Program and community programming throughout New York City. His work has appeared or is forthcoming 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.