$35, pre-registration required
An important part of growing up was learning to “behave yourself,” which often meant speaking softly or listening rather than speaking. I imagine, like me, many of you had a parent who said watch your tone when you speak to me or watch how you talk to your teacher. To stay out of trouble, we learned to speak one way to our friends, another way to our elders, another way to religious leaders, and yet another way to those we hoped to romance. We mastered the art of playing different characters depending on the social context.
And, all too often, we learned to simply shut our mouths and say nothing.
In this workshop we will expand the emotional range and subject matter of our poems by stepping into a variety of characters, employing their perspectives—their voices—as our own. This will allow us to engage aspects of our hearts and minds that have been forgotten or muted as we’ve learned to behave. What would Joe Biden say in a love letter to Beyonce? What does Cookie Monster really want to tell all the kids who watch Sesame Street? From the grave, what would George Floyd want us to know now? By wearing different masks, we may find poems of love, rage, mischief, desperation, lunacy and more. We will not sit with our hands folded; we will be seen and heard!
Tim Seibles, Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016-2018, is the author of several poetry collections, including One Turn Around the Sun (2017), Fast Animal (2012), which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, Buffalo Head Solos (2004) and Body Moves (1988). The National Book Foundation notes, “Tim Seibles’ work is proof: the new American poet can’t just speak one language…he fuses our street corners’ quickest wit, our violent vernaculars, and our numerous tongues of longing and love.”
Tim has received the Open Voice Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received a BA from Southern Methodist University and received an MFA from Vermont College in 1990. Seibles has served as a professor at Old Dominion University for over twenty years and lives in Norfolk, Virginia.