“Poetry,” Laurent Dubreuil writes, “suggests thinking experiments for the unthinkable.” How might we communicate experience in our poems when the meaning of an experience, even to us, seems less than clear? How can we invoke in our poems those encounters whose intensity exceeds language? What is meant by “thinking on the page”? In our meetings we will explore how as poets we might approach the fundamental challenge of irresolvable questions, and the relationship between clarity and uncertainty.

Over the six weeks of our workshop, we will read contemporary poems that take on the challenge of speaking the unspeakable as a prelude to exploring this potential in your own work. With detailed written feedback on individual poems in addition to group discussion and workshop, writers will develop their intuition for addressing what remains unknown and unclear in the known and familiar. As Sandra Lim writes in her poem “Amor Fati,” “Inside every world there is another world trying to get out.”

This reading and workshop course is for poets at every stage of their writing lives, and is oriented toward the composition of new work as well as to revisions of poems in draft stages.

KAREN SOLIE is the author of five collections of poetry. Her third, Pigeon (Anansi, 2009), won the Griffin Poetry Prize, Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Pat Lowther Award. A volume of selected and new poems, The Living Option, was published in the UK in 2013, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, FSG, 2015) was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, and her most recent collection, The Caiplie Caves (Anansi, FSG, Picador, 2019), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Her work has been translated into seven languages and has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada, the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Australia, including in the sixth edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Karen has taught writing for universities and writing programs across Canada and in the UK, and was the 2022 Holloway Visiting Poet and Lecturer for the University of California at Berkeley. She is currently on the creative writing faculty with the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

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