A new chapter in verse
Since it was founded in 1931, the Woodberry Poetry Room has played a vital role in preserving poetry and helping students, scholars, and the public experience verse through text, audio and visual recordings, and readings. Its new series, “Reinventing the Workshop,” is a sort of gaze inward, a chance for poets and teachers from across the country to examine the process and tradition of instruction in creative writing. “It is not a judgment on the workshop model to reinvent it,” said curator Christina Davis. “Like all made things, it invites revision, and it is one of the roles of poetry to question structures, to notice their deficits and remake them to elicit their un-actualized potential.” The series launched Feb. 12 at Knafel Center with Lyn Hejinian of the University of California, Berkeley, reading from her collection “The Book of a Thousand Eyes” and examining nontraditional mechanisms for poetic expression. “I wanted to propose...