Ed Madden Seminar: What Time is Made Of

What Time Is Made Of  

How do we write about time, how do we capture the work and texture of time? Not just the turn of season and day and year, but the phenomenological experience of time? What clocks run our worlds—especially now that the clocks of the world and the workdays of the week blur and bend. How do we remember? How can we use temporal markers (like those from popular culture) to remember, reconstruct, recover something of all we have lost? That sounds so conceptual, but we all know that time is material. It matters, it moves. In this workshop, we will look at selected poems addressing time and memory, poems that try to represent what time is made of, how we experience, and poems that point to and manipulate the work of memory. We will use these poems as prompts for writing our own poems representing the work of memory and the matter of time. 

Ed Madden is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches Irish literature, creative writing, and gender studies. He is the author of four books and four chapbooks. He is currently the poet laureate of the City of Columbia. In 2019, he was selected as one of the 13 inaugural poet laureate fellows of the Academy of American Poets, and he received a two-month visiting artist residency at the Instituto Sacatar in Brazil.