Image and Response: Writing Ekphrastic Poetry with Meghan Sterling
Image and Response: Writing Ekphrastic Poetry with Meghan Sterling
September 25th - October 23rd, 2024
Meets every Wednesday from 12 pm - 1:30 pm EDT via Zoom for 6 weeks.
Ekphrasis is a word many of you may be familiar with—from the Greek, “to speak out”—
it has become synonymous with “the art of describing art”.
While ekphrastic poetry is often defined as the writing of poetry about works of visual art, the tradition is truly focused on the close observation of objects and experiences, observation which connects with writing about the world, the environment, and the self. This makes ekphrastic poetry a beautiful venue for deepening one’s relationship to one’s art.
What do you see? What is absent? Where is the self in the image? Where is the not-self? Writing from one’s own work can be a challenge in seeing, sensing, and feeling into the image—not only what was intended, but what is there. Artists exploring their photography can find a journey of discovery lies inside responding to the image.
Join poet Meghan Sterling for a 6 week workshop on learning to write ekphrastic poetry based on your own work. Each virtual session will be an hour and a half long and will start with a brief group exercise in ekphrasis, a discussion of craft and approaches, time for writing in response to an image of each participants’ choosing, and a block of time to share new writing in a judgement-free zone of curiosity and support.
For examples of photography inspired ekphrastic poetry, check out Meghan’s Substack collaboration with photographer Eliza Bell.
This practice group will have a maximum number of 10 participants.
Kinship uses a pay-what-you-can honor system with a minimum donation or $50. The average contribution for a six-week practice group is $125. Please give as generously as you can. If you cannot afford the minimum contribution of $50 please don't hesitate to request a scholarship.
Meghan Sterling lives in Gardiner, Maine with her family. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, Radar Poetry, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The West Review, Pirene’s Fountain, the Inflectionist Review, Rise Up Review, the Mom Egg Review and many others. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press. She was Featured Poet in Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 issue, a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, published by Littoral Books. Her debut full-length poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Eric Offer Grand Prize Award. Her second full-length collection, View from a Borrowed Field, won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize and will come out in March 2023. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will come out in April 2023. Her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) will come out summer 2023. When she isn’t writing poetry, being a mom or going to spin class, she teaches workshops and works as a professional writer.
Because July Has Been Storm
& song, the fields emptied of their fires
as though God’s own hands have lifted
the sluices: the air scented with potatoes,
thinly sliced & fried in fat: the divisions
between outdoors & indoors crumbling:
the water world and the damp seeping onto
the ceiling and windowsills: peeling paint
in long wet strips: my daughter: quiet beside
the window fan: breathing into blades: her voice
a blurred stutter: my daughter: sliding across the tarp
sprayed by the hose: I didn’t ask my daughter to love it
here: she has come to want the wide planks beneath
her bare feet: she has come to want to lie in wet grass:
beneath the silver sky: still as a garden snake: she has
come like her grandparents to find: harbor in the field:
the boat of her house set sail: across the rest of her life
- Meghan Sterling
