The Lyric Self [Dante Michaeux]

The lyric poem is a text of emotion, a text of thought, expressed directly from the poet to the reader. Participants will read various examples of lyric poetry to observe differences in the mode and discuss methods of finding and channeling their lyric selves into a text. Through these steps, participants will produce a poem of their own and have a clearer understanding of lyric poetry in general. This workshop will focus solely on Anglophone poetry, with examples from Walt Whitman, Christina Rossetti, Jay Wright, Jorie Graham and Carl Phillips, and contain a brief introduction on the traditional forms of the lyric poem.