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Posted On: July 12th 2026, 07:30 pm
Desire, Myth, and the White‑Hot Center: A Two-Day Immersion in Poetic Craft and Critique
In this two-session seminar and workshop, we’ll gather at summer’s white‑hot center to think about how poems hold desire: urgent, unrequited, ecstatic, impossible. We’ll move from classical myth to contemporary work, reading poets who write into longing, desire, and the complicated layers of love and human connection.
The first meeting will be part close-reading, part generative lab. We’ll read poems together (mythic, lyric, and otherwise unruly) and respond to them through a series of prompts that invite you to write from your own sense of urgency, distance, fantasy, intimacy, heartbreak, and ecstasy, and so forth.
The second meeting will be a workshop devoted to your drafts. Together, we’ll talk about how to deepen emotional stakes, focus imagery, and make space on the page for contradictory feelings. By the end of the weekend, you’ll leave with new poems, a set of prompts you can return to all summer, and renewed ways of thinking about desire, connection, and what it means to draw from the white‑hot center in your own work.
Saturday & Sunday (8 hours over 2 days) | July 25 – 26 | 12 – 4pm ET | $275 ($220 for Members)
(Jul 25, 26)
This workshop will take place in the Stanley Kunitz Conference Room at Poets House.
In this two-session seminar and workshop, we’ll gather at summer’s white‑hot center to think about how poems hold desire: urgent, unrequited, ecstatic, impossible. We’ll move from classical myth to contemporary work, reading poets who write into longing, desire, and the complicated layers of love and human connection.
The first meeting will be part close-reading, part generative lab. We’ll read poems together (mythic, lyric, and otherwise unruly) and respond to them through a series of prompts that invite you to write from your own sense of urgency, distance, fantasy, intimacy, heartbreak, and ecstasy, and so forth.
The second meeting will be a workshop devoted to your drafts. Together, we’ll talk about how to deepen emotional stakes, focus imagery, and make space on the page for contradictory feelings. By the end of the weekend, you’ll leave with new poems, a set of prompts you can return to all summer, and renewed ways of thinking about desire, connection, and what it means to draw from the white‑hot center in your own work.
Saturday & Sunday (8 hours over 2 days) | July 25 – 26 | 12 – 4pm ET | $275 ($220 for Members)
(Jul 25, 26)
This workshop will take place in the Stanley Kunitz Conference Room at Poets House.
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