Poetry Workshop
Poet and environmentalist John Lane has published over two dozen books—personal narratives, essay collections, novels, drama, and screenplays in addition to poetry. Among his most notable poetry collections are Anthropocene Blues (2021);Abandoned Quary: New and Selected Poems, which won SIBA’s 2012 Poetry Book of the Year;and most recently Southern Range: Collected Longer Poems, 1980-2022, published last spring.
His nonfiction includes Coyote Settles the South, Neighborhood Hawks, Coming into Animal Presence, and Circling Home. A co-founder of the Hub City Writers Project, John is Professor Emeritus at Wofford College, where after 20 years teaching creative writing, he was instrumental in founding the Environmental Studies program. In 2023 he was the recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities.
Course Description
I’ve always been interested in attention and it’s become a little of a buzz word recently, with all the talk about social media, screen time, “the attention economy” and all that. But… poetry it can be argued is the original attention economy for artists, the art form/genre that has always focused us most on where we are and what’s happening here.
Over the course of our time together at Wildcares we attentive poets will focus on our own work, the work of a few other poets, and the larger questions of attention in the outer world.
After an introduction, the first three periods will be focused on student work, with the last sessions going to some poetics— Attention to things outside: The names of things, The texture of things, The story of things. Attention to things inside— Writing Poetic Abstraction: Philosophy and Theology. Attention to poetic form. Attending to repetition. Attending to surprise. And finally, a word about the economy and politics of attention as it relates to first-quarter 21st c literature.