We are pleased to present an Image Intensive workshop with Carol Ann Davis!
Deep Calls to Deep: Precision as an Instrument of Inquiry
with Carol Ann Davis
A four-week craft workshop on poetry
October 5-28 (no class on October 26)
Mondays and Wednesdays, 2-3:15 PM Eastern
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, Carol Ann Davis:
We are all familiar with the push-me pull-you nature of writing poems. You write a line that "sounds right," or stop at a certain point because it “seems natural” to do so. But what if you worked on the poem longer, long enough to find the ways it might lead you to its deeper, more nuanced findings, the one it was searching for all along? What if you called to your own deep?
Together we will both generate poems from prompts aimed at utilizing precision as an instrument of inquiry as well as work to deepen our exploration of our existing poems by returning to them with an aim toward unlocking detail and exploring form. Our aim is to learn more, about ourselves, the poem, and language itself.
Some questions we will work from:
- What do we learn from staying longer inside the details of a poem?
- What do we learn from formally experimenting with its shape or initial assumptions?
- What is the poem meant to teach us through our experience of writing it?
Our sessions will include reading, generative exercises, process discussion, a craft lesson here or there, and the assignment of additional work into each of these as our collaboration on the development of each individual poet emerges. Our aim is to put pressure on our first responses in order to develop a durable writing practice that allows each of us to reapproach our own experiences, not to tell them (as in “show don’t tell”) but to allow their own texture to be revealed to us in the process. Through the development of formal discipline, to show and be shown the mystery inside our own utterances.
Early drafts and blank pages will both be welcome—we will use each to go, as Elizabeth Bishop says, "into the interior" of the poem.
Structure
The course includes:
- 7 live sessions (75 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 is suitable for poets at all levels of development because it is aimed to meet them where they are. Prose writers interested in improving their sense of diction, syntax, or tone also welcome to join!
$895
This four-week seminar will be held on Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays from August 29-September 21.
About the Instructor
About Carol Ann Davis
Carol Ann Davis is a poet and essayist and the author of four books, most recently Songbird: Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2026). Her work has been published in The Georgia Review, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. An NEA fellow and finalist for a National Magazine Award, she is professor of English at Fairfield University, where she is founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that brings writing workshops to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence. She lives in Newtown, Connecticut.
About the Image Intensives
The Image Intensive series is aimed at fostering the growth of artists working at the intersection of art and faith. The Image Intensives offer 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.
FAQ
For additional questions, please email Image staff at image@imagejournal.org.
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