24Pearlstreet Workshops
Philip Metres
Inviting the Infinite: Poetry and/as Prayer
Poetry
September 24 to September 28, 2018
Tuition: $400
Class Size: 12
Session: summer
Level: 1 week asynchronous workshop
David, Mohammad, Rumi, Donne, Hopkins, Rilke, Louise Gluck, Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith: all have written poetry as an invitation to the infinite, to wrestle with God, longing create a refuge in the eternal. In this brief workshop, we will discuss a few approaches to poetry as a sacred practice, employing the rhetoric of devotional prayer. From these conversations, students will write two new poems inspired by poetry as sacred practice. Each student will receive workshop comments and offering some further readings and prompts for future writing.
Biography
Philip Metres is the author of Pictures at an Exhibition (2016), Sand Opera (2015), I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), A Concordance of Leaves (2013), To See the Earth (2008) and others. His work has garnered a Lannan fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Hunt Prize, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.