(Spring21) Online Poetry Workshop: Eligies Are Odes, Odes Are Elegies Too with Angel Nafis

*ONLINE COURSE*
Poetry Workshop with Angel Nafis
Eligies Are Odes, Odes Are Elegies Too
Dates: Monday, April 5 - Friday, April 9
Time: 7:00-8:30PM EST
Location: online via Zoom
Fee: $250

Whether you find yourself swept up in the awe of glorious celebration or debilitating mourning, the corresponding poetry you may turn to might carry some of the same ingredients. Exactly what makes an elegy or an ode anyhow? What is the difference between something elevated in delight or distress? And what about that murky area where we feel both joy and sadness? This workshop will focus on the components and potential of both the ode and the elegy. How they each bend to encompass the mundane and extraordinary elements of our earth. Participants will explore both structures in each of their traditional gestures of praise and grief - but too they will be asked to look at the possibilities of the "un-odable" things and the "immortal" things in their lives through the scrutinizing of the unconventional, the ordinary and the downright detestable. Relevant authors utilized in the workshop will include but are not limited to: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Toi Derricotte, Shira Erlichman, Ross Gay, and Aracelis Girmay.
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Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented NYC at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist ​​​Shira Erlichman and with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts