Forms & Features with Aishvarya Arora

No poet writes alone, and I wouldn’t want to. Whether implied or circumscribed, every lyric act is a relational act—a voice motivated to emerge from the void to address the self, the beloved, the stranger, the reader, the collective, or the future. It is the “multiplying personhood” of the second-person address, as the poet Jason Schneiderman put it, that enables us to eavesdrop or occupy multiple of these roles in a single poem. We survive because of each other; sometimes, we survive each other. How do poems embody our need for entanglement and our experiences with alienation? How can writing with the second-person reveal and reflect the complexity of our grief, rage, and desire?

In this generative workshop, we’ll read and discuss poems that use the second-person address in unexpected or inventive ways. Moving beyond modes like the epistolary, we’ll pay attention to poems where “the you” appears or disappears—shifting the arrangement between the speaker, the reader, and the addressee in real time—to create insight, surprise, and depth. We will write poems that create opportunities for us to speak—and be spoken to—in new ways.

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