Call and Response: The Ekphrastic Impulse in Poetry - Nate Pritts

October 11-12, 2008
Two-day workshop, limited to 10 participants
Tuition: $300
Application Form

All people have a natural tendency to react to the happenings around us. Poets work to distill this reaction and use it to motivate their own work. This inspiration can sometimes take the form of ekphrastic writing – a fancy Greek term that is used today to indicate a work of art that has been generated in response to another work of art. In this intensive workshop, We will interpret that term a little more broadly, to mean a poem that is generated in direct response to something (anything) where those traces are still pronounced in the finished piece. Through studying models (poems generated in response to paintings, other poems, songs, etc.), exercises (aimed at firing the transmitters in your brain to create riffs of all kinds), and direct pairing with visual artists as they produce, participants will find themselves more open to the varied impulses that surround all of us, while encouraging a more open receptivity to all forms of “art.

faculty

Nate has his M.F.A. in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and his PhD in Creative Writing and British Romanticism from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His first full length book of poems was Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX) and his second book, Honorary Astronaut, is forthcoming from Ghost Road Press in 2008. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, both print and online, including The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, Court Green, and Rain Taxi. The editor and sole shareholder of H_NGM_N, an online journal of poetry, poetics &c., Nate lives in Natchitoches, Louisiana with his family, where he works in advertising.