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Virtual Workshop with The Poetry Society of New York: Writing With and Through Panic
With poet Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué!
Panic, in its various forms—panic attacks, moral panics, a panicked crowd fleeing from the sound of a “gun’ that was nothing more than a balloon popping—may be the opposite of poetry. If poetry is slow, thoughtful, inspired, and nuanced, then panic is sudden, unthinking, repetitive, and unidimensional. In this workshop, we’ll experiment with what the forms of panic and poetry do to each other. How might poetry be a tool to cut through experiences of panic? How might poetry be built from a place of panic? Can a poem itself panic? Or is poetic thinking so counter to panic, that to write about panic at all is definitionally to relieve its epistemic tunnel vision? We’ll read examples from other writers, talk about the many valences of “panic” and panicked thinking, and generate our own experiments in the friction of these two forms.
About the Instructor: Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.
* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**
