Writing Workshop with J.D. Scrimgeour: Visitations

Visitations: The Strange Guest
A Poetry Workshop  

This workshop will examine some poems and prose by Stanley Kunitz to explore the idea of “visitation” in poetry. Why does one get visited? How does that visit alter a household or landscape? How might that visit connect us to history, personal and communal? We will consider uninvited and surprising visits and write poems about unforeseen arrivals of those lost, longed-for, and unexpected.

J.D. Scrimgeour, chair of the Athenaeum Writing Committee, was recently named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Salem. He’s the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent being the bilingual collection, 香蕉面包 Banana Bread. His essay “Stanley Kunitz’s Visitations,” appeared in AWP Chronicle.

American poet Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006) was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (precursor title to Poet Laureate) twice, in 1974 and in 2000. His collection Passing Through: The Later Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1995. He received many honors throughout his career including a National Medal of Arts, the Bollingen Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, both his parents were of Jewish Russian Lithuanian descent.

Class is limited to 12.