NOTE: If you came here from the Newletter for March's workshop, here is the correct link. 

Recently, the poet Ocean Vuong gave a “mini-essay” on metaphor via Instagram. In those essay-posts they wrote that figurative language was their “favorite literary device,” because it can create, what they called, “the DNA of seeing,” which they expounded on to say, “a strong metaphor can enact the autobiography of sight. For example, what does it say about a person who sees the stars in the night sky—as exit wounds?” In this workshop, we will discuss this mini-essay and the function of figurative language. We will read together poems of place and discuss some craft strategies for writing the emotional landscape. From our tour through these strategies, we will generate a series of prompts that we can use during and after the workshop to develop our figurative autobiographies.

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2020 Kunitz Prize and her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, APR, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, and Poets & Writers, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.