Meridel Le Sueur, the American feminist, journalist, novelist, and poet once wrote: “Don’t tell yourself that it is not up to you to write the true history. Who is to write it if not you? You live it. You write it.”
As an artistic practice, poetry is a powerful form of personal expression as well as a method for revealing the silenced voices, hidden histories, and forgotten narratives that shape our lives.
In this workshop, we’ll explore poems and techniques to help us incorporate cultural artifacts in our writing. In the process, we’ll read work by poets who examine historical events and objects in a variety of ways, including writers like Robin Coste Lewis, Layli Long Soldier, Tracy K. Smith, Philip Levine, Kevin Young, and Solmaz Sharif. We’ll also create our own poems using ekphrastic, erasure, free-writing, and more. Writers will leave the workshop with an expanded toolbox of craft techniques and several pages of new writing. The tools we’ll use are “methods of imagination” applicable to any genre, so poets, essayists, and fiction writers of all levels are welcome!
About the instructor
Marie Scarles is a writer, artist, and educator based in Philadelphia. A graduate of Wesleyan University and Rutgers University–Camden’s MFA in Creative Writing, she currently teaches first year writing Rutgers–Camden. Her work can be found in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Prolit,The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Date & Time
February 27, 2021
1:00 pm-4:00 pm