Dara Wier

About:

This is a workshop for poets who want to adventure ever more into conversations about poets as readers of their own poems, and poets as writers who thrive on upsetting some of the conventions of writing and reading. It's most important for you to be your own best reader, not your only reader, but your most insightful, alert, aware, difficult, hungry, demanding, and encouraging reader. You want to trust yourself, and trust that you're able to write what you aim to write. Do you think you know what you want to say and can't find the ways or means to say it– do you think you want to discover what you want to say in the act of saying it? Can these two ways co-exist and provide a poet with the energy and spirit, intelligence and imaginative emotions one needs in order to write the poems one hopes to write? If you feel that when you are writing you are in touch with something powerfully inspiring and infinitely true, you will benefit from joining in our four days of concentrated attention to your work and to poetry's omnipresent grace.

Note: Though this workshop is open to all, it is probably not appropriate for beginners.

Requirements:

This workshop is sold out, but we are accepting submissions for a waiting list. Please email mail@kwls.org for more details.

Biography:

Dara Wier was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Recent books include Remnants of Hannah and Reverse Rapture (awarded the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives Book Award). A Selected Poems is forthcoming from Wave Books. Her poems can be found in Pushcart, Best American Poetry, Norton, Soft Skull and various other anthologies, and in American Poetry Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, slope, Turnrow, New American Review, Volt. A limited edition, (X In Fix), is in RainTaxi's Brainstorm series. The Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American Poetry Review have supported her work. She's a member of the poetry faculty and director of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-director of the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. About Reverse Rapture, Stephen Rodefer writes "...a paratactic and sometime screened poetic narrative of thought, time, room, face, secrets, address, body, relations, religion, casual philosophy, the domestic, demons and the demotic, language and much else-- in a steady unfolding of distanced but under your skin mind-forms." With Guy Pettit and Emily Pettit, she edits and publishes chapbooks and broadsides for Factory Hollow Press.