We’re living in tumultuous, grief-struck times, and poetry’s role as a catalyst for redress has never been more necessary. As we process each day’s onslaught of news, many of us struggle to reconcile our roles as artists, citizens, agents of resistance, conscience, and care.
In this two-session class, we’ll spend one session looking at a handful of poets whose works illustrate the ways we might pivot—whether messily or fluidly—between the personal and the political, the private and the historical. The poets we look at will include Ross Gay, Danez Smith, Layli Long Soldier, and others. An assignment will be provided at the end of the first session. At the second session, we’ll workshop the assignment poems produced by the poets in the class.
Rick Barot has published three volumes of poetry: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize, and Chord (2015), all published by Sarabande Books. Chord received the UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.
Rick's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and two editions of the Best American Poetry series. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University. He is also the poetry editor for New England Review. His fourth book of poems, The Galleons, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2020.
More about Rick: http://rickbarot.com