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. Remote 4-Week Workshop | 4 Tuesdays | November 3 – November 24 | 6:30-8:30pm ET | $240 ($190 for Members) This remote class will take place on Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed to you by a staff member in the week leading up to the class start date. All are welcome, space is limited. A limited number of need-based scholarships are available. Please email support@poetshouse.org with any questions. By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by our Community Agreement. About the Educator: Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago.