Craft Seminar: On Imagistic Endurance with Jenny Johnson
Craft Seminar: On Imagistic Endurance with Jenny Johnson
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, June 7 + 8
12:00-2:00pm ET
Jenny Johnson
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, and The New York Times. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.
What are your strategies for conveying what you see, picture, or imagine through language? What do you notice? How long do you hold the gaze? What might happen if you held it longer, if you kept looking, if you refused to turn away from your subject? Furthermore, how is the work of a writer like that of a filmmaker? In this class, we will consider how cinematic techniques can be applied to poem making and descriptive prose. You’ll be asked to consider the types of camerawork you already employ when describing and the angles of observation that you tend to overlook. Come prepared to experiment with close-ups, aerial views, jump cuts, interior and exterior shots, etc. We’ll be taking cues mostly from poets, Chen Chen, Geffrey Davis, Jean Garrigue, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and K. Iver, to name a few, but writers of all genres interested in strengthening their imagery are welcome.
Workshop Highlights:
Observe camera work in model poems and discuss its effects
Reflect upon your patterns of observation and set new intentions for seeing
Generate new work that integrates a variety of camera shots
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 30.
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet, published by Sarabande Books in 2017.
In both their lyrical force and breathtaking formal sophistication, her poems are powerful meditations on love, the body, queer culture and identity, vulnerability and community. Featured in both the New York Times and by the Academy of American Poets In Full Velvet was one of the most highly praised collections of 2017.
Johnson’s honors include a 2015 Whiting Award and a 2016-17 Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere.
