Poetry Workshop: The Ode - Poetry of Celebration, Reverence, and Surprise
Week 8 | August 15–19 | Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall Poetry Room | Ages: 18+
Originating in a Greek root meaning “to chant” or “to sing” and first performed 2500 years ago during the earliest Olympic Games, odes celebrated the god-like feats of Greece’s finest athletes. They weren’t “just” poems, but productions that fused dance, the pluck and strum of stringed instruments, choral chants, and singing. In this workshop, participants will infuse their poems-in-progress—or poems composed during the workshop—with athletic intensity, playful rhythms, and memorable song. We will read (and read aloud) from our own work, as well as from the odes and anti-odes of poets such as Pindar, Lucille Clifton, Walt Whitman, John Keats, Pablo Neruda, Horace, Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, and Frank O’Hara. We will conjure a home for praise, reverence for the hidden as well as the awe-full, and the surprise of authentic insight.
Flexible. These workshops are structured to both workshop the writing of those with drafts relevant to the workshop focus and produce useful craft analysis and discussion with optional take-home prompts for those looking to generate new work during the week. (Ages 18+)
Class Times
John Repp
A poet, fiction writer, essayist, and book critic, John Repp grew up along the Blackwater Branch of the Maurice River in southern New Jersey and has lived for many years in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020, published by Broadstone Books.
For more information: http://johnreppwriter.com/inde...
