The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

An epistolary form offers intimacy and a sense of composure: the reader as voyeur, and the writer in charge, addressing a potential interlocutor, but one who will not, we all know, talk back—at least for now. There’s a sub-genre of the direct-address poem, one that might be both safer and stranger as a forum in which to work out a difficult idea: poems that talk to objects, poems that talk to some non-sentience. Why do we do it? To be freer of our own consciousness? To honor the ‘otherness’ we know must exist? To trick ourselves into a deeper place of reckoning than we feel able to approach with any witness actually watching, listening? The group will explore poems by Ponge, Vap, Koch, and Emanuel.