To Hell & Back: A Poetic Journey

Part poetry workshop, part mythic quest, “To Hell and Back: A Poetic Journey” invites participants to go down to the underworld and reemerge to make poetry out of what is found there. Imagery, narrative, fragment, silence, and other poetic devices will be our tools for the journey down, the excavation, and the return. We’ll also call upon our visionary powers with the help of divination and guided visualization. What lost or stolen ways of knowing or feeling might we retrieve by going down? What possibilities for emotional or spiritual transformation does the poetic process offer? Our guides will be mythological figures such as Persephone, Eurydice, and Innana as well as poets who have shared visions of underworlds and otherworlds, including Rita Dove, Sandra Lim, Shara McCallum, Joyelle McSweeney, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, and Vanessa Angélica Villareal. If you know what it means to have gone to hell and back—to have survived grief, illness, depression, wandering, isolation, or any long winter—join us as we venture to write about it.

Instructor

BECCA KLAVER is a writer, teacher, editor, scholar, and literary collaboration conjurer who believes that poetry is magic. She is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Midwinter Constellation, a book cowritten with 31 other poets in homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, will be published in early 2022. As an editor, she cofounded Switchback Books, is currently coediting the anthology Electric Gurlesque, and has created pop-up journals such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants and Across the Social Distances. A member of the Iowa City Poetry Advisory Council, she lives in Chicago. beccaklaver.com