POETRY DANCES IN NEGLECT: FINDING INSPIRATION IN THE GREAT AMERICAN STRIP MALL LANDSCAPE

This generative workshop will feature a craft talk about engaging with the landscape (or human-shaped space) outside our front doors. What sort of spaces do you walk into from your front door and how can they inspire your poetry? Who are your neighbors? Where are the graveyards, marked and unmarked? What sort of histories saturate this land, even if it is covered up in strip malls and suburbia? So many of us live in spaces that have not been considered beyond their money-making potential and yet we can find poetry in these neglected, ordinary spaces. NC poet A.R. Ammons wrote, “Poetry dances in neglect, waste, terror, hopelessness—wherever it is hard to come by.” This workshop will examine how to hear that dance tune and to engage with the nature (or lack of nature) where we live, realizing that no matter how mundane, even our backyard can be, “an extraordinary accelerator of consciousness, of thinking, of comprehending the universe,” as Joseph Brodsky put it.

About the Presenter

Annie Woodford is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019) and Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer UP, 2022), recipient of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press in 2023. She has been a Rona Jaffe Poetry Scholar at Bread Loaf and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has also been a recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University and the Thelma Smallwood Scholarship from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been published in Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Southern Humanities Review, Cutleaf Journal, and Still: The Journal, among others. In 2024, she was awarded the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review. Originally from Henry County, Virginia, she now lives in Deep Gap, NC and teaches at Wilkes Community College. More info. can be found at www.anniewoodfordpoet.com. 

MEETING INFORMATION

This program will be presented during our upcoming PST member meeting, to be held August 10 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm Eastern / 1:00 – 3:00 pm Central via Zoom. Members will be provided a link a few days prior. If you are interested in learning more about PST, check out our website. If you’d like to attend our meeting as a guest, contact us at poetrytennessee@gmail.com.