Workshop: Writing With and Through Panic with Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
Panic, in its various forms—panic attacks, moral panics, a panicked crowd fleeing from the sound of a “gun’ that was nothing more than a balloon popping—may be the opposite of poetry. If poetry is slow, thoughtful, inspired, and nuanced, then panic is sudden, unthinking, repetitive, and unidimensional. In this
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workshop, we’ll experiment with what the forms of panic and poetry do to each other. How might poetry be a tool to cut through experiences of panic? How might poetry be built from a place of panic? Can a poem itself panic? Or is poetic thinking so counter to panic, that to write about panic at all is definitionally to relieve its epistemic tunnel vision? We’ll read examples from other writers, talk about the many valences of “panic” and panicked thinking, and generate our own experiments in the friction of these two forms.