Waiting for Icarus: Ekphrastic Poetry Bootcamp with Dr. Emily Carr

Week 1: October 16, 17, 18
Week 2: October 23, 24
Week 3: October 30, 31, November 1

Time: 10:00 AM-12:00 PM

Join award-winning author and joyous revolutionary art educator Emily Carr for a total immersion in ekphrastic poetry, guaranteed to jolt you into poems you didn’t know you had inside you!

The tradition of ekphrastic poetry is ancient, rich, and varied, with poets from Ovid to Frank O’Hara taking delight in metamorphosing visual objects – famous paintings, family photographs, local lakes, pop songs, avant garde ballet, old episodes of Star Trek, Achilles’ shield – into poems. Writing ekphrastic poems can help us to overcome writer’s block, to shock ourselves into saying things we didn’t know we wanted to say, and to simply have fun and find inspiration – both on and off the page!

In this generative, boot-camp style workshop, we’ll explore Ringling exhibitions and gardens with a new focus: igniting our writing. Each session, we’ll discuss sample poems, experiment with provocative writing prompts, write, share, and scheme Our Next Great Poems. We’ll challenge each other to write one poem a day for eight days – and yes, we will save time to workshop our poems in a safe and supportive environment.

Finally, we’ll collaborate on Waiting for Icarus, an interactive, scavenger-hunt style Ekphrastic Poetry Showcase held during Art After 5 on Thursday evening, November 2. This is an intimate and low-stakes way to celebrate our time together, share our poems with the public, and spark others to make their own ekphrastic art!

This bootcamp is for writers, for folks who don’t yet identify as writers, and for folks who aren’t sure if they want to identify as writers. Participants will leave with tools they can use in their everyday lives to nourish their own creative endeavors, whether those happen on or off the page.