The Poetry of Art: A Generative Seminar with Dean Radar (via Zoom)

There is an amazing moment in Book 18 of the Iliad where Homer stops talking about war and begins, in great detail and great emotional depth, to describe the shield of Achilles. Many point to that moment as the first example of ekphrasis—the practice of writing poetry about art. Few poetic endeavors have proven more durable (and more enjoyable) than ekphrasis, and in recent years, ekphrastic poetry has branched into exciting new territory. This seminar, with a generative writing component, will look closely at several different forms of ekphrastic poetry and will give participants a chance to write their own ekphrastic poems. We will read and discuss works by William Carlos Williams, Jorie Graham, Louise Erdrich, Rainer Maria Rilke, Monica Youn, Victoria Chang, and others.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom ( Sunday, October 13, 12:30-4:30 PM ET) and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email misty@writerscenter.org with any questions.

All HVWC scholarship applications will be available on May 1 and will be due on May 15 for all summer/fall 2024 classes.

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His 2014 collection Landscape Portrait Figure Form was named by The Barnes & Noble Review as a Best Poetry Book. Other titles include his poetry collection Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and the anthologies Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Rader writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where he co-authors a poetry review column with Victoria Chang. In 2020, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Balakian Award. His new book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, features Rader’s poems alongside corresponding images by the artist Cy Twombly. Garnering rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, The Poetry Foundation, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, Before the Borderless was recently named by Book Riot as one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry. Rader’s writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, the MacDowell Foundation, Art Omi, The Headlands Center for the Arts, and the John R. Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, where he was a 2019 Fellow in Poetry. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.