In this two-part poetry workshop, we’ll take inspiration from art on display at Tinworks to: 1. Explore the concept of poems as vessels and 2. Bring fantastical animals to life through poetry.

How can words, like clay, create vessels to contain what we feel, observe, or hope to preserve? And what happens when we deliberately crack our poetic vessels and invite the wild surprises that can arise out of imperfection? What do fantastical animals, coaxed from the depths of our imagination, have to tell us? How might these creaturely beings become part of our personal mythologies and give voice to unexpressed aspects of ourselves or our environment?

Participants will be guided by generative prompts to draft 4 poems and will have the opportunity to share their work. No creative writing experience is necessary. Required materials: A notebook and pen or pencil.

Rose DeMaris is a poet and educator who loves synthesizing language and imagination to explore connections between human beings and other facets of the cosmos. Her award-winning poems appear in a wide variety of literary journals and on poets.org. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow. Website: rosedemaris.com // IG: @rose.demaris