The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

In this session, we will dive into a deeper understanding of the poetic and imagined body by looking deeper into our own definitions of exploitation and exploration. Part of the session will press on language often used in connection to the body to explore the presence of emotion internally and how that may manifest externally. We will try to focus on the visualization of the poetic body and discuss its formation in poems from the perspectives of different writers. Taking these visualizations, we will try to map out the connection between the bodies we form in poems and how they are able to carry grief, guilt, and acts of atonement. This will be partially explored via brief presentations on contemporary poems, drawing/sketching, and a generative prompt. The goal of this session is to guide us to a better understanding of how we make sense of our complex identities through poems and how to ensure we are intentional about our practices with the imagined self.