Poetry Master Class: Removing the Muzzle, Writing After a Season of Silence

When faced with individual or collective trauma—whether a pandemic or political unrest, sickness or poverty or death—we enter survival mode. Our brain’s amygdala lights up and triggers our “fight or flight” response, or the lesser discussed, “freeze.” And in that distressing season, as we yearn for human connection and for ways to communicate our pain, we often find ourselves unable to speak. In her essay, “On Impoverishment,” poet Louise Glück writes, “For two years, I wrote nothing, not a word. It seemed increasingly impossible to remember a time when I had been fully alive. …. To teach myself hope, I began, thirty years ago, to chart periods of silence in the same way that I dated poems. And I have repeatedly seen long silence end in speech.” In this class, we will read and discuss several poems that were written after the poets endured a significant period of silence or grief, and we will examine how these poets say the unsayable so that we, too, can access what Glück calls “the writing that begins after such a siege.” We will end our time with a writing exercise and leave equipped with a handful of poems and prompts designed to unleash a new season of unrestrained writing for each of us.

Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet and the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), winner of the Late-Night Library’s 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry and a finalist for both the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Ploughshares, Pleiades, Waxwing, The Rumpus, North American Review, the Best New Poets 2010 anthology, and the 2017 Best of the Net Anthology. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, and elsewhere, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Login details and handouts are sent to participants shortly after registration.