USING THE NEWS: A Generative Poetry Workshop with Martha Collins (Zoom)

How do we respond, as poets, to the increasingly disturbing news of our day, as well as the history that brought us to where we are? This four-hour workshop will begin with an hour-long discussion of poems that artfully respond to contemporary issues (politics, race, immigration, climate change, war) and/or to relevant historical events and situations that continue to impact the present. A major focus will be on using and transforming news accounts, factual information, and historical documents into poems. The last three hours of the workshop will be spent in careful discussion of your own poems (which may or may not relate to the topic described above: your choice).

Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry is Casualty Reports (Pittsburgh, 2022); her tenth, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). Her awards include an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, two Ohioana awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. Collins has published five volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese, most recently Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tuệ Sỹ, with Nguyen Ba Chung  (Milkweed, 2023), and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and later served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com