The Open Mind: Lessons from the Visual Arts with Eléna Rivera

This workshop will focus on the ways the visual arts informs poetry, not just in writing in and about visual art (architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, performance art, installation and public art), but also the ways that the visual arts can help us to re-see our writing practice. How can the visual arts expand our idea of the poem, our practice of making, and help us access inspiration and stimulate our sensibilities? In this six-week workshop we’ll write to, with, and in response to these forms of art, see what they have to teach us, how the methods of art-making can enliven our poetry. Participants will be given writing prompts and exercises to stimulate their creativity to generate work for a final project of their own choosing. We’ll read short selections from various artists on their art-making process, such as Agnes Martin, Teju Cole, Nathaniel Dorsky, Gabriel Orozco, Gabrielle Civil, and read poets like Frank O’Hara, William Carlos Williams, Barbara Guest, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Ashbery, Gertrude Stein, John Taggart, Cornelius Eady and Anne Carson, among others.

Eléna Rivera‘s third full-length collection of poetry Scaffolding (2017) is available from Princeton University Press. Recent chapbooks include LE SOUCI FORMEL/ the formal concern from Belladonna (2016) and her bilingual artist book Disturbances in an Ocean of Air (Estepa Editions, France, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, Denver Quarterly, Jacket2, Aster(ix) and The Volta among others. She won the 2010 Robert Fagles prize from the National Poetry Series for her translation of Bernard Noël’s The Rest of the Voyage (Graywolf Press, 2011), and she has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Foundation and the Millay Colony.

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