Now Or Never: Poetry Writing Workshop with Kathleen Ellis

Tuesday & Thursday, August  10,12, 17, and 19 from 10 am to 12 noon,
On Zoom

A two-week, live ZOOM workshop exploring poems that stop you in your tracks. What have you always wanted to write? A poem beginning with an absurd or outrageous assumption? A poem that starts and ends with the same two lines? A prose poem or a poem that shocks you? In this two-week workshop, we will explore new ways to think about what a poem can do if we extend our range and rage as well as our indignation and concern for this endangered world. Using the museum’s exhibits and diverse poetic styles, we will generate new poems for class critique in a supportive environment. Poets and visual artists of all levels welcome. 

Participants will be sent links to artwork from the Farnsworth’s collection, current exhibits and selected poems prior to each workshop week.

Kathleen Ellis’ most recent poetry collection is Outer-Body Travel. Recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission, she has led poetry writing workshops at the Farnsworth since 1994. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Maine, Orono, and new poems appear in Café Poetry Review, Pain: Poems for the Pandemic, Enough! Poems of Resistance andProtest, and A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis.

There will be a live Once in a Blue Moon Poetry Reading on Zoom with participants from both workshops, on Monday, Aug. 23, 2021, at 4 pm.

Cost: $250; $200 members