DocuPoems: Exploring the Past and Present through Poetry: A Writing Workshop w/ Leslie Marie Aguilar

This workshop will evaluate poetry as a form of legitimate documentation. We will discuss how poetry is informed by the world at large and how it represents important cultural and social events both past and present. Through close readings of creative and periodical texts, we will trace the lineage of lyric history through poems, newspapers, magazines, and social media all while analyzing the overlap between each of these genres. We will attempt to answer the following question: what does poetic tradition reveal about poetry’s place in the world? By infusing various documentation techniques with differing poetic forms (elegy, erasure, lyric, meditation, ode, etc.), we will write poems, DocuPoems, that function as valuable intersections between the private and public personas that chronicle our collective history.

Leslie Marie Aguilar originally hails from the heartland of Texas. She has served as the Poetry Editor of Indiana Review and received her MFA from Indiana University. Her work has been supported by the National Society of Arts and Letters and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Hobart, Ninth Letter, Rattle, Sonora Review, and Washington Square Review among others. She is the author of Mesquite Manual (New Delta Review, 2015).