Complete Description

Juan Ramón Jiménez once wrote how he was tired of the poetry of his day that never went beyond a personal I” as if that was all there was in the world. For him, escaping, though not denying the confines of the self, was crucial. Like Wordsworth he wanted the sphere of he self to expand. The German-Austrian poet wrote in “Literature as Utopia”: “For what is the I, what could it be?—a star whose position and trajectories have never been completely determined and whose core has not been comprehended in its composition. That could be: myriads of particles composing the I, and at the same time it seems as if the I were nothing, the hypostasis of a pure form, something akin to an imaginary substance, something that refers to a dreamed-up identity, a code for something that takes more pains to decipher than most secret orders…. Most vulgar languages and its most pretentious ones still share in a dream of language; every word, every syntax, every period, punctuation, metaphor, and symbol redeem something of our dream of expression, a dream that is never entirely to be realized.”

“Do I contradict myself?” wrote Whitman in “Song of Myself,” “very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.),” by which he was describing the way we are constantly changing and taking on various roles.

In this every-other-week workshop series we will try moving beyond the confessional “I” that tends to still dominate poetry today and explore our potential “multitudes.” Each month you will receive a short prose selection with examples to read beforehand along with some suggested prompts. Then you will submit a poem a few days before the workshop for our workshop discussion. The sequence below is aimed at gradually expanding our horizons.

1)     EXPHRASTIC POEMS: SEEING THROUGH OTHERS’ EYES (April 22)

.In this workshop we will try to enter the world of a piece of art to create a kind of parallel world. Borrowed from the Greek term ekphrasis, or “description,” early ekphrasis was used as a vivid description of a thing. One of the earliest examples of ekphrasis was Homer’s description of the forging of the Shield of Achilles in the 18th chapter of The Iliad. The purpose of ekphrasis was to describe a thing with such detail that the reader could envision it as if it were present. Homer’s description of Achilles’ Shield brings the shield to life in the reader’s imagination

2)     DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: BECOMING SOMEONE ELSE (May 6)

In this session, by taking on the mask of another, we will explore the possible selves within our selves by writing in the voice of another. “In which utterance is there ever a face—and not a mask?” wrote the Russian critic, Mikhail Bahktin. And the French poet, Rimbaud, once wrote, “I is another” and Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote:

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.

3)     ECO POETRY: DEFENDING THE WORLD (May 20)

It is precisely that kind of larger harmony described below that we will strive to create by describing an ecological crisis of your choosing. Aldo Leopold, the writer who first conceived of the entity nature, as we now think of it, wrote: “This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it—a vast pulsing harmony—its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. 

4)     POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY (June 3)

In this workshop we will each build a poem alluding to the ideas behind a philosopher we each choose. One of the great classical poems is Lucretius’ “On The Nature of Things,” which is an epic that explores Epicurean philosophy including the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. And Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “Really one should write philosophy only as one writes poetry.” Wittgenstein moved from an esoteric mode to an evangelical mode, aiming for an effect on his audience that was noncognitive, appealing to the temperament in addition to the intellect. We can see this also in a poet like Wordsworth whose Prelude is subtitled “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.”

About Richard Jackson

Richard Jackson is the author of sixteen books of poetry including Footprints: Poems (Press 53, 2025), The Heart as Framed: New & Select Poems (Press 53, 2022), Where the Wind Comes From (Kelsay Books, 2021), Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018) and Dispatches: Prose Poems (Wet Cement Press, 2022), and twelve books of essays, interviews, translations and anthologies. Other books include: Take Five (Finishing Line, with four other poets, 2019), Traversings (Anchor and Plume, 2016) Retrievals (C&R Press, 2014), Out of Place (Ashland, 2014), Resonancia (Barcelona, 2014, a translation of Resonance from Ashland, 2010), Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (Autumn House, 2004), Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (Ashland, 2003), and Heartwall (UMass, Juniper Prize 2000), as well as four chapbook adaptations from Pavese and other Italian poets, and a chapbook of prose poems, Fifties. The Heart’s Many Doors is an anthology of poems by American poets on the artists Metka Krašovec (Wings Press, 2017). He has translated a book of poems by Alexsander Persolja (Potvanje Sonca / Journey of the Sun) (Kulturno Drustvo Vilenica: Slovenia, 2007) as well as Last Voyage, a book of translations of the early-twentieth-century Italian poet, Giovanni Pascoli, (Red Hen, 2010). In addition, he has edited the selected poems of Slovene poet, Iztok Osijnik.

He was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars by the President of Slovenia during his work with the Slovene-based Peace and Sarajevo Committees of PEN International. He has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH, and two Witter-Bynner fellowships, a Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award, the Crazyhorse Prize in Poetry; he is the winner of five Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Best American Poems as well as many other anthologies.

His poems have been translated into nineteen languages including books in Slovenia and Barcelona. His books and chapbooks have won numerous awards including the Juniper Prize, Maxine Kumin Award, Cleveland State Poetry Prize, Choice Award, Agee Award and others. He has given hundreds of readings and lectures in the United States and abroad, from Hong Kong to India to Israel and eastern Europe. He has taught at the Iowa Summer Festival, The Prague Summer Workshops, and regularly at UT-Chattanooga (since 1976), where he directs the Meacham Writers’ Conference. He has taught at Vermont College of Fine Arts since 1987, winning teaching awards at both schools. In 2009 he won the AWP George Garret Award for teaching and writing.

He also edited over twenty chapbooks of poems from Eastern Europe. His own poems have been translated into seventeen languages including Worlds Apart: Selected Poems in Slovene. He has edited three anthologies of Slovene poetry and Poetry Miscellany, a journal. He is the author of Dismantling Time in Contemporary American Poetry (Agee Prize), and Acts of Mind: Interviews with Contemporary American Poets (Choice Award). Originator of Vermont College of Fine Arts’s Slovenia Program, he was a Fulbright Exchange poet to former Yugoslavia and returns to Europe each year with groups of students.

Thanks to my wife Terri, who is also my best friend and reader, and for Ata Moharerri and Brabara Carlson for looking at earlier versions. Thanks also to the River Pretty Writers’ Conference for comradeship and support, to Vermont College of Fine Arts, its faculty and its incredible students who continue to teach me as much as I hope they learn, and to my former students at UT Chattanooga who continue to inspire. Thanks, finally, to Pia, my secret editor.