Part of The Poetry Society of New York's Weekly Virtual Workshop Series.

With poet Elizabeth Metzger!

What is memory? And what is its relationship to forgetting? With forms like odes and elegies, remembering a lost other and being remembered have been cruxes of the lyric tradition from the beginning. The practice of memorizing or the praise of a line as “memorable” are famously part of the experience of poetry. How can we harness memory (our memories and the mental, temporal, emotional processes we associate with remembering) in new ways to write our most memorable poems and perhaps change our relationship to forgetting? We will read poems that treat memory from a variety of perspectives in order to learn and practice new approaches that might surprise us into transforming our human fear of forgetting and being forgotten into the linguistic and emotional power to voice and shape memory into a force on the page that is ongoing, vast, living, present and shockingly new.

About the Instructor: Elizabeth Metzger is the author of Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the chapbook Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and she lives in California.

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**