If you live in the New York City area, I am now teaching a weekly workshop at Brooklyn Poets (144 Montague St) on Tuesday evenings from 5–6pm! It’s part of their Weekly Drop-In Series and it costs $25 at the door, but less if you register in advance. If you become a member of Brooklyn Poets, it’s just $20. Each workshop will be playful and involve Metaphor Dice.
Workshop Description: Metaphors are really just equations between big ideas and smaller things with perhaps an adjective added to one side as a variable. Think of Mary Oliver’s beloved phrase “the soft animal of your body” from “Wild Geese” or W. B. Yeats’s “rag and bone shop of the heart” from “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and you can see a similar formula at work. Every human culture uses metaphor to talk about and help make sense of the complexities of our own lives. In this weekly drop-in class, poets of all levels will use Taylor Mali’s metaphor dice to embark on an exploration of the playful nature of figurative language. We’ll start each class with an examination of a metaphor from a well-known poem, discussing how it works and why the poet might have chosen it. The rest of the workshop will be generative and playful, using rolls of the dice as prompts for short explorations of how the metaphors rolled—”my father is a broken mirror,” “poetry is no petty songbird,” “love is a handed-down frailty,” etc.—can be artfully applied to our own lives.” Sharing will be encouraged but optional.
