Instructor: Rosebud Ben-Oni
In these trying times of social distancing and anxiety, how do we connect now? How can we reframe our expectations for the future, our hopes and happiness, through a poetry of a new, sometimes painful but necessary candor? In this workshop, we will examine the complexities of joy and feeling joy through the lenses and modes of the cacophonous, the fragile familial ties and even the elegy. Various writing prompts and exercises that seek to address will include one or more following:
• What are the many ways one can translate the feeling of joy onto the page? How does joy distinguish itself from other modes of fulfillment and contentment?
• How can sorrow and rituals mourning lead to revelations, and have that revelation bring and/or transform into joy?
• What greater truths can one find in unraveling familial ties in poetry– truths that might speak both pain and joy in that discovery?
• In exploring the complicated relationship between nature and human nature, how can we find hope for the future?
• What are the joys in letting go? What of the joy in being– and even remaining– uncertain in these unsettling times?
This workshop will be presented virtually.
$60 General; $10 Camden residents.
About the instructor: Rosebud Ben-Oni won 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which received a Starred Review in Booklist, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020). Her work appears in POETRY, APR, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, among others. A recipient of the NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellowship, her work has been commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial in NYC.
Date & Time
November 10, 2021
6:00 pm-9:00 pm