Forms & Features with Imogen Osborne

Poems can be bewildering. Perhaps it’s their engagement with missingness that makes them so, or maybe it's the suspicion cultivated in schools that poems are hiding something. Either way, poems can be considered as tokens of the unknown.

“Aporia” comes from the Greek, meaning “impassable.” It’s the rhetorical term for an expression of doubt within poetry. Sometimes genuine, sometimes feigned, aporia is the literary equivalent of throwing up one’s hands: puzzled, confused, dumbfounded, stuck. Aporia often takes the form of a question. 

In this workshop, we’ll explore the effects of using questions in our poems: from irresolution, imbalance, and rupture to contact and intimacy. Questions can be openings, offerings, or keyholes through which to look directly at our reader. 

We’ll consider the questions that exist in our poems either explicitly or implicitly, and listen for the ones still stirring. We’ll split our time between reading, generative writing, and (optionally) revising a previous poem.

This workshop is for participants aged 18 and older, of all backgrounds and experiences with reading and writing poetry.