Who is Speaking?, a workshop with Peter Gizzi—May 1, 2024

We will question the relationship between world and word and ask who is speaking in a poem. Do we speak or are we spoken? We will consider the role of mystery, presence, and intimacy in our writing.

Requirements: Please bring in 2 poems with copies to distribute with the workshop.

1. One poem of your own poems of your choosing to share.

2. And a second poem written in response to a book of poetry that you love. Please try to write an "imitation" from your reading of the book. You are required to bring in this response poem and a small paragraph on how the book affected the writing of your poem. Also, bring a copy of the book to class.

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), Now It’s Dark (2020), and Archeophonics, a finalist for the National Book Award (2016), all from Wesleyan. In 2020 Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems and later this year, Penguin UK will bring out an expanded edition of Fierce Elegy. His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. Editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and with the late Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.