Poetry and Place: Writing about Landscape, Home, and Travel

This seminar will meet in person at WriterHouse for one session on Saturday, Oct. 24 from 1:00 to 5:00 PM.

Description

Poets have long explored what it means to inhabit particular places and spaces. Wordsworth famously celebrates daffodils “dancing in the breeze” in the Lake District in England, while Elizabeth Bishop, who spent much of her life in a foreign country, plaintively asks, “Should we have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?” Poets like Frost continually discover something new in landscapes they know well. Other poets write about meanings they uncover in settings they only know through travel. In this one-day seminar, we will look at a range of poems exploring landscape, home, and travel. Our primary focus will be on work by members of the group that reflects this general theme. 

About the Instructor

Margaret Mackinnon is the author of two collections of poetry, The Invented Child (Silverfish Review Press 2013), winner of the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry from the Library of Virginia, and Afternoon in Cartago (Ashland Poetry Press 2022), winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Her work has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Image, Poetry, Blackbird, and other journals. She attended Vassar College and the University of North Carolina, and she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. She lives with her family in Richmond.