APOLLO AND DIONYSUS
All Levels | This workshop takes its title from Nietzsche’s essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” wherein he cites the dialectic between Apollonian and Dionysian forces in the human character as making up the main wellspring of art, from the time of the Greek golden age to the present. We will look at various poems by poets such as Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Philip Levine, James Tate, and more to see how these two forces manifest themselves, and then we’ll write poems of our own with an eye and ear toward the embodiment of these forces in our own work.
Joseph Millar
Joseph Millar's first collection of poems, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. Kingdom was released in early 2017, and his latest collection, Dark Harvest, New & Selected Poems, was released in 2021.
Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University's low-residency MFA Program and in North Carolina State's MFA Program in Creative Writing.
