Teaching Artist: Amie Whittemore
Dates: Monday, July 6-Sunday, August 2, with access for an additional 30 days
Format: Asynchronous with weekly Zoom office hours at a time to be determined with cohort. (Zoom sessions will be recorded for those who are uable to attend live.)
Description:
In conservation, “rewilding” is the work of restoring ecosystems through repairing connections among the many plant, animal, and fungi species sharing a place. In this class, we will use the concept of “rewilding” to rethink how we approach nature poems, examining both critical texts and poems to explore alternate ways to engage with nonhuman life in our creative work.
By reading texts by Kemi Alibi, Anne Barngrover, Nickole Brown, Camille Dungy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Merlin Sheldrake, Joanna Macy, and others we will explore ecopoetics from a variety of lenses (i.e., queer, feminist, indigenous, and spiritual). We will take a playful, experimental approach to generating new work inspired by the places we live and the nonhuman life with whom we share those places.
Taught by
American Poet Laureate Fellow & 2020-21 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere.
Guided cohort • Flexible pacing • Write in community
sneak a peek in Week One!
So what are we to do? Are we just going to write poems about it?
How might we rethink our role on the planet? Our relationship to nonhuman life?
What might it mean to renew our relationship to nature and nature writing?
How can we live in better harmony with the earth?