|

Subversion and Subconscious: Generative Verse Through Meditative Practice with Julie E. Bloemeke via Zoom


“…The poet shows how the invisible is more real than the visible—that the visible is merely a late outcome of an invisible reality that rules us the way the subconscious rules us.  Our dreamscape is larger and rules us more than this waking state.  Beyond the dreamscape there is another consciousness…” –Li Young Lee for Kenyon Review 

Feeling mired in your writing practice?  Open to challenging how your poems get to the page?  Join us for a generative workshop where we will cultivate space for the subconscious to reveal new avenues of verse composition.  After reading a brief selection of poems that subvert our ideas of what a poem can be or do, we will explore our own practice. Through various forms of guided meditation and a few unexpected writing prompts, we will write, contemplate, and share.

Please be sure that you are in a comfortable environment with minimal distraction. As we will rely on the analog for this workshop, a notebook and pen will be necessary.

NB: This two hour craft class will be taught on Zoom.

Julie E. Bloemeke’s first full-length collection of  poetry, Slide to Unlock, debuted with Sibling Rivalry Press in March 2020. In 2021, Slide to Unlock was chosen as one of two full-length poetry collections statewide as a Book All Georgians Should Read. Slide to Unlock has also earned Bloemeke a nomination for the 57th Georgia Author of the Year, with winners to be announced in June, 2021. A  fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bloemeke earned her MA in American Literature from the University of South Carolina–where she was a Ramsaur Fellow–and her MFA in poetry from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Cortland Review, Pine Hills Review, Crab Orchard Review, Muse/A Journal, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Poet Lore, and others. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in a number of anthologies including Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Popculture Poetry Anthology, The Pandemic Poetry Anthology, A Constellation of Kisses, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, The Great Gatsby Anthology, The Sense of the Midlands,  The Nancy Drew Anthology, The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V: Georgia and the My Cruel Invention Anthology, among others.

Her ekphrastic poem, “After Rousseau’s ‘The Dream,’ Museum of Modern Art, 2016,” was a finalist for the 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize through the Telluride Institute, and one of her telephone-based poems from Slide to Unlock, “You’re Breaking Up,” was nominated for Best of the Net in 2020 by Pine Hills Review. Her ekphrastic work on Philip C. Curtis was selected for a limited edition chapbook anthology collaboration between the Phoenix Museum of Art and Four Chambers Press; she also won the 2015 ekphrastic poetry competition at the Toledo Museum of Art where her work was on view with the Claude Monet collection.  Her poetry and photography series on abandoned buildings in the Atlanta suburbs was featured in Deep South Magazine. She recently co-edited a tribute issue of Limp Wrist for Dolly Parton’s 75th birthday in January 2021. As a teacher of online poetry workshops, she has worked with such organizations as Reading QueerThe Wild and Precious Life Poetry Series, and The Ranch in Tiburon, California.  She is a proud native of Toledo, Ohio.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown has called Julie E. Bloemeke’s debut collection “a kind of philosophical love poetry” in which the poet has “located in the body the satisfactions of the mind.” Seductive in its exploration of telephone and screen culture, Slide to Unlock is an unflinching examination of our love affair with tech language, a pointed unraveling of our perceptions of intimacy in an ever-evolving digital landscape. Drawing on place as anchor and point of departure—from Toledo, Ohio, to Paris and Venice—Bloemeke’s poetry is both ruthless and tender, an offering and a confrontation, which the poet Jane Hirshfield has praised as “utterly dazzling.”

Event Location and Ticket Information

Date: Saturday, October 30, 2021
Times: 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Ticket pricing:

Get tickets now
- 124

Presenter: Hudson Valley Writers Center
Presenter Phone: 9143325953