Poetry Workshop | A Quest for Innocence in a Troubled World with Carmen Bugan

When

Tuesday April 29, 2025: 5:30pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: 4th Floor Meeting Room

Description

Honing hope; awakening a poetics of wonder in a worrisome world. This workshop brings to the poetic table three things: the inspiration to go on a quest; rediscovering a sense of innocence in language; and the overwhelming realities of today’s troubled world.

We will talk about the ways in which time and experience strip the freshness and innocence from language and how the work of poets and storytellers reimagine language as a place of new beginnings. How do we re-discover language? Is childhood an innocent place? Is linguistic innocence desirable for a poet in the context of so much societal conflict?

We will take inspiration from several poems including Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘On the Seashore’, Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘The World’, Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘The Innocence of Radium’, and Alexander Pope’s ‘Ode to Solitude’.

Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of ten books including poetry, memoir, and criticism. Her most recent collection of poems is Tristia, out January 2025 with Shearsman, and her most recent collection of essays is Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her new and selected poems, Lilies from America (Shearsman, 2019), was a PBS Special Commendation. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter (Picador, Graywolf, 2012), won the Breadloaf Nonfiction Prize, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was translated into Swedish and Polish.