October 26, 2024 (Zoom): Fall Poetry Intensive
The League is excited to present an inaugural online poetry intensive, a series of four workshops presented by four diverse poets on unique subjects. Although this is an all-day event, participants are welcome to attend only some of the workshops. Regular breaks are built into the day's schedule to accommodate bio breaks and snack/lunch breaks.
Saturday, October 26, 2024 | 11:30am - 6pm ET
Free for members | $25 for non-members
Discounts are available for Black, Indigenous, racialized, LGBTQI2S+, and disabled poets using the coupon code IDEA2024.
Sessions will be recorded and available to members and registrants following the event; however, live participants will uniquely benefit from the opportunity to engage in discussion with workshop facilitators and other organizers.
Icebreaker & Breakout Rooms
11:30am - 12pm ET
Visual Poetry for Fun and Exploration
with Amanda Earl
12 - 1pm ET
Introduction to Video Poems
with Brenda Clews
1:30 - 2:30pm ET
Writing from the Body: a Pain Poetry Workshop
with Cassandra Myers
3 - 4pm ET
Writing for More Empathy
with Cornelia Hoogland
4:30 - 5:30pm ET
The League does not tolerate discrimination or hate speech, including microaggressions, and any attendees engaging in bad-faith discussion around issues such as diversity, participant safety, accessibility, and equitability will be removed from the workshop. We encourage attendees to ask tough questions, but to remain respectful of the diversity of lived experience among participants.
Session descriptions
Visual Poetry for Fun and Exploration, with Amanda Earl
Visual poetry (Vispo) can be an excellent and enriching literary and art hybrid form that is an addition to poets’ investigations of poetry, of language, and the world. In this session, Amanda Earl will provide a survey of contemporary visual poetry with discussion and examples of work by contemporary visual poets. Discussing the connection between visual poetry and literature, the workshop will explore how both forms work to disrupt and question the status quo and to investigate the role of language in society.
Each participant will have the opportunity to plan and think about a visual poem to create. Various tools and ways of making visual poetry—from the typewriter to Letraset to photoshop to handwriting—will be reviewed.
Introduction to Video Poems, with Brenda Clews
This workshop is for poets curious about or already working with the art of video poems. While we will cover a scant history of this art form, “Introduction to Video Poems” focuses on how you can create your own video poem without relying on hiring a team to record, edit, and produce it. The session will provide an introduction to the field, showcase a few examples of video poems made by solo creators, and offer a variety of ways for poets to produce their own video poems.
Writing from the Body: a Pain Poetry Workshop with Cassandra Myers
“Writing from the Body - A Pain Poetry Workshop” is a writing workshop using Ayurvedic healing and traditional Chinese medicine as well as somatic strategies of generative writing to write from the body and re-story chronic pain. It is proven by pain research that by naming and reframing chronic pain it actually reduces symptoms. The goal of this Workshop is to be able to reclaim your own personal story on chronic pain, while remapping your symptomology through a decolonial lens of traditional East Asian and South Asian medicine. As a South Asian person I'll be using these practices in line with my therapeutic techniques as someone with a Masters of Social Work and a clinical counselor. The workshop will use tools of pain reprocessing therapy, and mindfulness from a decolonial narrative approach.
Writing for More Empathy with Cornelia Hoogland
We’ll begin this workshop by looking at one or two poems, noting such things as the writer’s chosen topic or theme, their formal and linguistic choices, and their empathetic narrator. Our guided reading of each poem will reveal to us elements of form, structure and empathy we can apply as a template onto our own subjects and can offer us one way to approach, and write, our own experiences. Experience is various and includes our insights, delights and struggles, as well as our preferred ways of exploring our topics through poetry. The template can help avoid the formal or linguistic habits writers fall into and can offer alternatives such as deepening the poem through empathy, thereby refreshing our writing practice and surprising us.
About the facilitators
Brenda Clews is a multi-media poet, artist and video poet who interweaves poetry, painting, theory, dance and video in in her work. She hosts a Poetry & Music Salon in Toronto and has published the luminist poems (LyricalMyrical Press) and Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions) with solo art shows at York University, Q Space and Urban Gallery.
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a queer writer, reviewer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin Anishinaabeg traditional territory, colonially known as Ottawa, Ontario. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca, and editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a collection of long poems about her near-death health crisis. Her latest chapbook is Seasons, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia. Earl offers an editing and mentoring service for creators of visual poetry, prose, poetry and hyrid forms. Visit TinyUrl.com/AmandaEarlEdits for more information.
Cornelia Hoogland is the 2023 winner of the Colleen Thibaudeau Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award given by the League of Canadian Poets. She’s the author of a graphic novel and eight books of poetry and chapbooks, several short-listed for national awards. She’s served as the writer-in-residence at artistic venues across Canada. www.corneliahoogland.com
Cassandra Myers (My’z) (they/she/he) is an award winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, and counselor from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra's work is cinematic and juicy with it's critical anti-oppressive eye. Cassandra’s work has won national literary and spoken word titles including the National Magazine GOLD Award in Poetry and Champion of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Their work has been internationally received at the Ada Lovelace Festival in Berlin, and elsewhere. Find their poetry in ARC Poetry Magazine, Canthius, the Tahoma Literary Review, and more.
These workshops are presented by the LCP Webinar Series.