The Nebraska Poetry Society is offering monthly Saturday morning online poetry workshops. Registration is required, and registration information may be found on the Nebraska Poetry Society webpage. Free with annual membership; nominal fee for non-members. Students, minors and others for whom the registration fee is prohibitive may request a free membership.

December 14, Julia Guez “Mapping Our Poems” In “The Archaeology of Knowledge,” Michel Foucault writes, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous forms, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.” In this generative writing class, we will begin with a word or phrase, line or lines from another book of poetry. After mapping out ideas, feelings, rhythms, syntaxes and words we associate with the line or lines we have brought in, we will start work on our own poems. (Throughout, we will engage in mini-breaks that can be incorporated into people’s everyday writing rituals in the future, to spur our creativity and collaboration as a workshop). The lines we begin with may be embedded in the poem we write, or turn out to serve as the seed, scaffold or prompt. The process of building a poem in conversation with other poets and poetry, is one that will hopefully prove to be a rewarding approach for you to take in your writing practice moving forward.

JULIA GUEZ is a writer and translator based in the city of Houston. “The Certain Body” (Four Way Books, 2022) is her second collection of poetry, written while she was recovering from COVID in the spring of 2020. Guez holds degrees from Rice and Columbia.