Compose Creative Writing Conference 2024

“The most sensuous poets are the ones I trust the most,” says the poet Jorie Graham, citing the way that a word like “justice” can mean a thousand things to a thousand people while a word like “salt” has a much smaller range of possible associations. This workshop will focus our attention on the world of the senses and how our poems can sharpen and heighten our sensorium, offering a shared subjectivity beyond one’s perceptual confines, a way to, together, engage with a larger aliveness. The title of this course is a line from a Lucille Clifton elegy. We'll use this and other poems as a lens to consider the ways our current cultural moment is an invitation to widened wonder.