Re-membering the Classics in Poetry

In this workshop, you'll visit the senses and your memories (in honour of Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses) to generate poetry inspired by themes from classical antiquity.

The event will start with opening exercises that invite you to translate sensation into language, and invoke classical mythic figures through remembered epithets/associations. You'll then work with personal memory and music, in order to relate poetry and memory, and memory-as-poetry more explicitly in our writing. Finally, you'll use the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Labyrinth, an archetypal space that bridges frontiers of rhyme and reason, to revisit, reassemble, and re-member a character of your choice through poetic engagement with the senses.

This workshop will acquaint you with the vagaries of personal memory as fragmentary, in dialogue with the fragmentary presences of collective memory that reside in the enduring literature, material culture, and myth of classical antiquity.