Inventing New Poetic Forms Workshop with Kathleen Ellis

In this workshop, participants will expand their range of poetry writing styles and forms by intermeshing poetry and photography, memory, culture, and current events. Using selections from Teju Cole’s Blind Spot and works by Forrest Gander, Claudia Rankine, Cole Swensen, Wislawa Szymborska, and others as conceptual starting points, we will jump-start four new “lyrical-essay poems” based on what we see, read, imagine, and re-vision. Poets and visual artists of all levels welcome.

Award-winning poet Kathleen Ellis has published five collections of poetry, most recently Outer-Body Travel. She is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission, as well as Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda poetry prize. Her manuscript of poems, Dear Darwin, was set to music and released as a Parma Recordings CD and nominated for a 2015 Grammy award. Ellis teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Maine, Orono.