Class Description

We write poems for many reasons, some of which have to do with our obsessions with time. Our poems can be attempts to defy time, wrestle with it, understand it, reclaim it, pause it, or even just marvel at it. In her essay “The Poem as Time Machine,” poet Tess Gallagher makes the case that “we have no better machine for the re-invention of time than the poem.” In this workshop, we’ll use poetry as a vehicle to transport us to childhood, not just through memories, but as a way to have the present self interact with past and future selves. An old photograph is a fixed image, but a poem, Gallagher posits, is “the place where the past and future can be seen at once without forsaking the present.” We’ll consider contemporary poems by Derrick Austin, Arda Collins, Trish Crapo, Geffrey Davis, Jennifer L. Knox, Audre Lorde, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Brenda Shaughnessy and discuss the different ways they invite speaker and reader back to the terrain of childhood. These poems will be launching pads for generating our own poems; each participant will leave with three new poem starts as well as take-away ideas for writing beyond the workshop. INSTRUCTOR REBECCA OLANDER is the editor/director of Perugia Press, a nonprofit feminist poetry press. She has taught poetry writing at Amherst College, Westfield State University, and Mass Poetry, and she works with poets in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. Her poetry and collaborative visual and written work has been published widely, and her books include Dressing the Wounds (dancing girl press, 2019) and Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). She holds a BA from Hampshire College, an MAT in English from Smith College, and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.