We are pleased to announce another Image Intensive, an opportunity to dive deeper into your craft, guided by faculty from our community who understand the unique impulses and challenges facing artists at the intersection of art and faith.

From our facilitator, Scott Cairns:

We’ll begin our time together by discussing two approaches to what words are and how words work. We’ll do our best to privilege the more generative approach, which appreciates words as being more than simply names for things; we hope to cultivate a disposition that allows us to see words as also being things, things with agency and power. Thereafter, we’ll look at some rabbinic responses (traditional midrashim, in particular) to difficult/dark/confusing scriptural passages, and then we’ll pore over a selection of  what we might recognize as midrashic modern poems. The rest of our time together will be given to our poring over the scriptures in search of dark sayings—passages that provoke our wonder and, perhaps, consternation—and work to develop a practice of response. Ideally, when our time comes to a close, each of us will have further developed a responsive writing practice that will serve us for the rest of our writing lives.

Most of our sessions will begin with our reading and discussing a text (a passage of scripture, a midrash, a midrashic poem) and this discussion will be followed by our beginning to rough out the text of a poetic response in either verse or prose. We will share these immediate responses with one another, and each of us will respond generatively to each others’ responsive text. Among other things, we will want to talk about word choices that will “open” the text, rather than close it down to singular and conclusive statement.

Structure
The course includes:

• 8 live sessions (60 minutes each) over 4 weeks
• Sessions focused on a mix of reading, discussion, and generative work
• One personalized critique (up to five poems submitted)

Who Is This Workshop Best Suited For?
This workshop will be best suited for poets (and other writers) who love words, as such—their suggestiveness, their etymologies, the ghosts of meaning that haunt our language. The class is for folks who love to discover what they mean by attending closely to what they find themselves saying.