Workshop Opportunity and Updates

Split This Rock and the Sunday Kind of Love reading series invite you to participate in a writing workshop with Lorna Dee Cervantes (who is reading at Sunday Kind of Love on Sunday the 21), Saturday, June 27, from 1-4 pm. Thanks to support from the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities, the cost is $25. The workshop is open to all levels of writing from beginning to advanced—and will be geared towards helping you generate new work. (Our next and final writing workshop of the season will be in August with Terrance Hayes... stay tuned for more details on that).

Register today; send an email to melissa.dcpaw@gmail.com.

Workshop Description: Ecopoetics: A Poet's Way of Knowledge

There are about as many ways to write a poem as there are people on the planet. In poetry, as in love, there are no absolutes, and that's the only absolute. So, how does one make sense of the plethora? How, when faced with the whole enchilada, does one go about the process? For poetry is a process, above all else. As Coleridge once wrote, "Poetry is the pleasurable activity of the journey itself."

In this workshop we will map out the journey by dividing the poetic universe (multiverse) into four distinct phases of the creative/critical process: GENERATION, SELECTION, Re-VISION, and CRITICAL EVALUATION. Much the way we splay out the patterns on a globe into east, south, west and north in order to get anywhere, no individual phase is more important than another and each has its own distinct character and unique phenomena. We will participate in exercises designed to match each phase of the process - rather than focus undue or premature attention upon poetry as product. We will discuss and consider many roads leading us there, to the finished poem ("finished" in the orgasmic sense rather than as executioner or, worse, as taxidermist.) We should, by the end of the day, come away with at least 4 new poems and a sense of our own patterns and patterning (for better or worse) and we will acquire a new toolbox of techniques and methods, a new confidence and playfulness, a new sense of our own strengths and weaknesses as writers, and maybe even become acquainted with our own inner critic as well as become accustomed to the sound of our voice as well as our own individual "Voice" as a poet.

Each workshop will be unique to its participants. This workshop respects all and expects such from participants. Expect diversity. Expect to learn how to pleasure yourself - so to speak.

Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of DRIVE: The First Quartet (Wing Press, 2006), From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (Arte Público Press, 1991) and Emplumada (1981), which won an American Book Award. Her work has been included in many anthologies including Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (eds. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan, 1994), No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Women Poets (ed. Florence Howe, 1993), and After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (ed. Ray González, 1992). In 1995 she received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

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For an update on poets reading at Artomatic, see First Person Plural, the blog of the Writer's Center.