Objects & Objections with Lisa Hiton (Via Zoom)

Objects begin in a utilitarian fashion–as a knife spreading butter on toast, a sweatshirt worn on a cool afternoon, a hammer hanging in the garage–but grow in meaning the longer we live with them and the more closely we consider their position in our personal lives and larger cultures–if that butter knife were your grandmother’s, if that sweatshirt were the hood on the cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, if that hammer made your desk. This course will explore how objects can evoke many emotions, memories, and poetic modes to bring the speaker and reader to intimate and revelatory places. Whether we are looking at an object or speaking for it, poets can bring meaning and voice to such objects that they transform from ubiquitous to mythic.

Lisa Hiton is a poet and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY. Her first book of poems, Afterfeast, was selected by Mary Jo Bang to win the Dorset Prize and is available from Tupelo Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University and an MEd in Arts in Education from Harvard University. She is the author of the chapbooks The Clearing (Black Lawrence Press) and Variation on Testimony (CutBank Literary). Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Linebreak, New South, NPR, PEN America, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She is the Founder and Producer of Queer Poem-a-Day on the Deerfield Public Library Podcast.