Winter 2021-22

As I approach the new year, I begin to move at a snail’s pace. It feels good and right and much-needed. It’s been a marathon two years, and it doesn’t look like the finish line is approaching anytime soon. Ever the optimist, I’m moving onward and forward. When I work on gratitude, I focus on being at peace so I can be present for others.

 

Anything That Happens

“I don’t know that I have ever heard of a book of poetry being called a page-turner, but I opened it when it arrived in the mail, expecting to just take a quick peek and read the rest as I had more time, and ended up sitting down and devouring it. Just gorgeous”

—More reviews at Goodreads

“Anything That Happens is a mature poetic inquiry into the ways early trauma can reverberate through the whole of a life—relationships, family, one’s sense of self. The poems are candid, sharp-edged and very well rendered. You can taste “the bone in the broth” here as Wilder works through the maze of emotion. In the end, we witness change and redemption, but the psychic weight remains. As she aptly describes it: ‘I am two people now— // the before and the after; one I’ve already forgotten, // the other I have not met.’” —Mark Cox, author of Readiness: Prose Poems

Upcoming Events

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Architecture & Poetry Series

Getting Your House in Order: Crafting Poems for the New Year

With pressure and fatigue brought on by the Omicron surge, Kevin Watson (Press 53) and I decided to simplify the sign-up and reduce the price.

 

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Workshop Description

In this online, monthly workshop series, we’ll explore what I call the multifaceted house—home as shelter, sentiment, identity, self, and poem. Equipped with poetry and architecture tool belts, each month we’ll look at aspects of craft as we ask ourselves, what does it mean to have a house?

January 26, 7:00-8:30 PM EST

Making a Threshold: Beginnings and Suspended Moments
We’ll begin the year with Gregory Orr’s charge to look at “the poem’s suspended moment as a threshold between disorder and order.” How do poems help poets create order from disorder? What happens when we apply “order” to the topic of home? We’ll read a variety of examples and also discuss the effect of threshold as a poem’s beginning. Come ready to write a poem-house for the new year. Prompts will be provided.

February 23, 7:00-8:30 PM EST

Space in Poetry: Applying Boundaries and Movement
Architect Louis Hammer said, “Every building is a palimpsest on which are written countless poems of space.” In this workshop, we’ll look at how the space we occupy influences us and our poem-making, and vice versa. We’ll apply spatial terms like boundary, space, and static and dynamic to poems. Come ready to write, revise, or both depending on time. Bring the poem you started in the first class.

March 23, 7:00-8:30 PM EST

Line Breaks as Experience: Creating Prospect-Refuge in Poetry
In the third installment of “Getting Your House in Order,” we’ll explore the line break as a way to create prospect-refuge. Prospect-refuge theory, by geographer Jay Appleton, establishes that humans have an innate characteristic “to see without being seen.” In poetry, the line break taps into the instinct Appleton ascribes. We’ll look at poems to see how poets balance prospect-refuge to build trust and maintain reader engagement. Then we’ll apply prospect-refuge to our own poems. Please bring a poem to revise. Poems from previous workshops in the series are encouraged.

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