The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2016

The strongest poems, I’d propose, speak from more than one part of the self. How does a poem shift registers — moving, say, from intellect to intuition, or from sense perception to feeling? We have a number of varieties of knowing — from the rational to the subterranean, from description to touch. We’ll look at some stellar examples, and talk about technical means of shifting the gears of our own thinking, in order to try for poems that are more dimensional and complicated. more, that is, like life.